I had no idea what to expect when I picked up this debut mystery. When I finished it, I thought, Crouch is gunning for Harlan Coben's audience and she's done a very good job. Like many of Coben's stand alone thrillers, Middletide is, at its dark(ish) heart, a love story. Crouch's prose is more literary than Coben's but she's yet to hit his level of fiendish suspense. That said, Middletide is a worthwhile read.

The book opens on a cold morning in 1994 with two fishermen finding a hanging body on the shores of Puget Sound. The corpse is that of the preternaturally beautiful Erin Landy, the main doctor in the small town of Point Orchards. What looks like a suicide is determined by local sheriff, Jim Godbout, to be a murder, a murder that has far too much in common with a book, written 13 years earlier, by Elijah Leith, a reclusive author on whose land the body swings.

From there, we cut immediately to 1973 where we see Elijah, at 18, pledge his life long love to a Native American girl, Nakita, who lives on the nearby reservation. Then we are in 1977, then 1992, then 1994, then 1992 again--the book zigs back and forth through time, slowly setting out the context of the relationships between Nakita, Elijah, and Erin.

This is a novel that lays its conceits out slowly. Early on, we know that Elijah, despite promising to return to Nakita in 1977, did not. He spent ten years in California, writing Middletide, his first great novel. The novel was a flop due to a single negative review from the ubiquitous Times and Elijah, out of money and ashamed, slunk home in 1992. He began rehabbing the cabin he'd grown up in while earning a living working in his dead father's best friend's--Chitto--garage. He longs to connect again with Nakita who is in mourning for her husband of five years who was killed in a hunting accident. For her part, Erin is still devastated from the loss of her young daughter who was recently killed in a car accident.

Crouch leisurely takes us through Elijah's life in Point Orchards. When he is not learning how to live off his land, he is trying to get Nakita back and, I must confess, for much of the book, his thoughts about her veered towards the borderline obsessive. We spend a lot of time with Elijah, but we also with Erin's and Nakita's as well. We get hints about what their lives look like when the murder occurs but stlll, at the 60% of the mark, I had no idea how the three were, in 1994, connected.

Then, a discovery is made and it is suddenly blindingly clear who killed Erin but only to the reader. The cops are remarkably credulous until they are not and I found their behavior to be frustrating. The last quarter of the novel moves at breakneck speed and the story's resolution is more or less satisfying.

Crouch is a strong writer, especially about the land and her unusual timeline gives the book an intellectual interest the plot doesn't quite match. The characterizations of Nakita and Erin aren't especially nuanced and, though Elijah is clearly limned, I wasn't crazy about him as a person. He's one of those leads that's interesting to read about but not especially endearing.

But I did, overall, enjoy the book. The mystery, for much of the novel, is slippery and the story doesn't feel any need to demonize any of its characters. This is, oddly enough, a feel good story, with a resolution Coben would cheer. I'll definitely be reading whatever Crouch writes next and, if you like unusually plotted literary mysteries, you'll enjoy the time you spend reading Middletide.