Middletide is a 90s-era murder mystery about an author who returns to his hometown only to be accused of a crime that mimics the plot of his novel.

Told in dual timelines, Middletide is the story of a small-town police department trying to solve the murder of a local doctor staged to look like a suicide, and the return of a “prodigal son” to his hometown after a setback. When the separate timelines converge, the reader realizes that the murder and the local man are connected in a rather dramatic way.

I enjoyed the slow coming together of the two stories but felt the plot was weak in a couple of major areas. The first issue I had was with the sappy romance between the main character, Elijah, and the girl he left behind, Nakita. I enjoy a good second-chance romance but felt zero chemistry between these two, and their relationship felt oddly chaste and sterile for two people in their thirties. Equally perplexing was his short-lived entanglement with the beautiful local doctor that led to her death. The other area that felt weak was the entire investigation and court case. I found the motive behind the crime disappointing, and the reveal was just kind of dropped on the reader without any “aha” moment. I’m by no means a legal expert, but much of what occurs in the last twenty-five percent of the book seems unrealistic and too easily resolved.

Overall, I enjoyed the pace of this book and the overarching concept, but I felt it fell apart in the details.