Middletide by Sarah Crouch was a BOTM pick earlier this year, and it’s not my usual fare but I was looking for something that would draw me in. It’s a mystery that takes place in a small town in Washington, among a fictional indigenous tribe. Elijah has returned home to his family’s empty, isolated home on a lake after giving up on his dream of becoming a writer. He tries to rekindle his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, a woman he abandoned when he left after high school. When that fails, he gets involved with a local woman who later turns up dead, on his property. Who killed her? This book wants to be Where The Crawdads Sing, but it falls short. The characters are not well-developed, the relationships are too simple to be realistic, there aren’t enough suspects, and the pacing of the book is weird. Crouch’s depiction of grief, as experienced by two of the characters, was woefully pat and simple, which also really bothered me. Other characters were reduced to cliches. I got to the end because I wanted to know how it would resolve, and because the audio narration by Kaleo Griffith was pretty good (except his female voices – ugh).