Title: Middletide
Author: Sarah Crouch
Publisher: Atria Books
Publication date: June 11, 2024
Length: 288 pages
Genre: Thriller/mystery
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:

In this gripping and intensely atmospheric debut, disquiet descends on a small town after the suspicious death of a beautiful young doctor, with all clues pointing to the reclusive young man who abandoned the community in chase of big city dreams but returned for the first love he left behind. Perfect for fans of All Good People Here and Where the Crawdads Sing

One peaceful morning, in the small, Puget Sound town of Point Orchards, the lifeless body of Dr. Erin Landry is found hanging from a tree on the property of prodigal son and failed writer, Elijah Leith. Sheriff Jim Godbout’s initial investigation points to an obvious suicide, but upon closer inspection, there seem to be clues of foul play when he discovers that the circumstances of the beautiful doctor’s death were ripped straight from the pages of Elijah Leith’s own novel.

Out of money and motivation, thirty-three-year-old Elijah returns to his empty childhood home to lick the wounds of his futile writing career. Hungry for purpose, he throws himself into restoring the ramshackle cabin his father left behind and rekindling his relationship with Nakita, the extraordinary girl from the nearby reservation whom he betrayed but was never able to forget.

As the town of Point Orchards turns against him, Elijah must fight for his innocence against an unexpected foe who is close and cunning enough to flawlessly frame him for murder in this scintillating literary thriller that seeks to uncover a case of love, loss, and revenge.

In this new mystery, a man returns to the small town he left behind long ago, to hide out from the world after the failure of the novel he spent ten years writing. Elijah’s family cabin in Point Orchards has been slowly deteriorating since his father’s death years earlier. Bit by bit, Elijah brings the cabin and its land back to life, eventually taking pride in managing to live off the land — raising chickens, growing and canning his own vegetables, even learning to bake bread.

But the one element of his former life that he can’t face is the girl he left behind. When he left for college, he promised to return to Nakita, but never did, lured instead by the shiny promise of a book deal. Now both in their mid-thirties, Elijah and Nakita have faced more in their lives than they’d ever imagined, and the question is, can they find a way to forgive past wrongs and reconnect, possibly even fall in love once again?

The framing of the story is a suspicious death: The town doctor, the beautiful, tragic Erin Landry, is found hanged on Elijah’s property. It looks like a suicide, but circumstances just don’t add up. As the local sheriff investigates, signs start to point to Elijah himself as the perpetrator, especially once it’s discovered that his novel lays out a very similar death, in which a murder is set up to appear to be a suicide.

Chapters in Middletide alternate between the investigation into Erin’s death and the earlier years of Elijah’s return to Point Orchards and his attempts to start fresh and rebuild his life. Eventually, the two timelines merge into one, as the book culminates in a courtroom drama.

I probably could have saved myself some earlier false theories if I’d read the synopsis above, which makes it clear that Elijah is, in fact, innocent. (There’s room to doubt that at some points in the story.) But really, the answer to the murder mystery is about as obvious as it gets — I guessed the overall solution pretty early on, and was correct in just about every way.

To put it bluntly, this is not a great story. Elijah comes off as arrogant in some key scenes, even when we’re meant to like and understand him. His shallow emotional responses undercut our investment in him and make it harder to root for him to find happiness with Nakita.

“You have no clue what it feels like to have your entire future drop out from beneath your feet without warning. You can’t possibly imagine how devastating that is.”

“Actually, I can,” Elijah shot back “I know what it’s like to have to start over from scratch after the life you thought you were meant for doesn’t pan out, remember?”

“Doesn’t pan out? Elijah, my husband was shot in the head and died at thirty-five years old. Where do you get the nerve to compare that to your failed writing career?”

The author includes a note at the beginning stating that Nakita’s tribal affiliation and reservation are fictional inventions, inspired by real indigenous nations. Which, fine, except Nakita’s heritage and the relationship between the town and the reservation don’t actually matter much in Middletide. I excepted this aspect to be more developed, but really, the impact on the plot is minimal and the characters are underdeveloped.

The courtroom scenes feel almost like an afterthought. For anyone who’s ever watched a lawyer show on TV, the trial is not structured as we’d expect. The prosecution calls a few witnesses, then the defense immediately jumps in with a witness, but the prosecution never rests, and as far as I could see, there was no discovery before the trial. Hey, I’m no lawyer… but I’ve seen enough courtroom dramas to know that this didn’t go the way it should. And don’t get me started on Elijah’s lawyer not actually being a lawyer…

Here’s a spoilery bit, so skip this next paragraph if you care about avoiding spoilers:

One key piece of evidence is the diary found at Erin’s house. The entries all start with “Dear Diary” and seriously, do you know of any adult women who actually write in their diaries that way? It’s supposed to be written by a mature professional woman, and she’s writing as if she’s in middle school? Don’t get me started on the non-existent chain of custody for evidence either. Well, okay, in one scene, the deputy hands the diary to Elijah to look at in his jail cell. Excuse me, what? That’s a key piece of evidence, and you’re just handing it to the accused to paw through?

End of spoilers…

On the positive side, Middletide is relatively short (under 300 pages) and goes by quickly, so reading this book isn’t a huge time commitment. It moves quickly, and kept me turning the pages, although by midway through, I was tearing through it mostly to prove myself right rather than out of any real engagement with the characters.

As negatives, though, in addition to the implausibility of the legal case, the convoluted timeline (those chapters set in the past and the present mush together and are annoying to track), and the predictability of the outcome, the writing can be clunky and/or not well considered. For example:

On the day his editor called and read him that horrible review he had flung open his bedroom window in a fit of rage and dropped the orange typewriter to the sidewalk three stories below.

I suppose this is meant to show us a possible violent side of Elijah, but I just had to laugh. The guy was living in San Francisco at the time — no way did he throw his typewriter out a third-floor window in the middle of the city and not end up arrested for killing or injuring a pedestrian.

Also, it’s mentioned that his publishers had high expectations for his book’s success, but apparently this one very bad review absolutely sank it, and the book only sold 48 copies. What? If the book only sold 48 copies, then it wasn’t just one bad review that was responsible. This makes no sense to me.

As I mentioned already, there are scenes where it is very hard to like Elijah. While perhaps that’s meant to create suspicion or doubt, in actuality it just leaves us with a main character whose self-centeredness makes us not particularly want the very likable love interest to subject herself to being with him.

And so on. I could give more examples, but I’ll stop here.

Middletide is a murder mystery with a hollow center. On the one hand, it did keep me interested enough to speed through to the end — but on the other hand, I didn’t buy into the characters, found the mystery utterly predicable, and felt the courtroom drama was rushed and not believable. I expected a much better reading experience.