Thank you Forge Books #partner, for the finished copy of Carolina Moonset in exchange for my honest review.
Publisher: Forge Books
Published: May 31, 2022
Summary:
Both suspenseful and deeply moving, Carolina Moonset is an engrossing novel about family, memories both golden and terrible, and secrets too dangerous to stay hidden forever, from New York Times bestselling and Emmy Award-winning author, Matt Goldman.
Joey Green has returned to Beaufort, South Carolina, with its palmettos and shrimp boats, to look after his ailing father, who is succumbing to dementia, while his overstressed mother takes a break. Marshall Green’s short-term memory has all but evaporated, but, as if in compensation, his oldest memories are more vivid than ever. His mind keeps slipping backwards in time, retreating into long-ago yesterdays of growing up in Beaufort as a boy.
At first this seems like a blessing of sorts, with the past providing a refuge from a shrinking future, but Joey grows increasingly anxious as his father’s hallucinatory arguments with figures from his youth begin to hint at deadly secrets, scandals, and suspicions long buried and forgotten. Resurfacing from decades past are mysteries that still have the power to shatter lives—and change everything Joey thought he knew.
Especially when a new murder brings the police to his door…
My thoughts:
I cannot believe I waited so long to read this book! It had been sitting on my shelf since I got it back in 2022 and on a whim, I finally picked it up and now I am kicking myself for waiting so long…this book was such a surprise, in a good way! Matt Goldman is a new-to-me author and you can bet I’ll be adding all his books to my tbr!
This small-town mystery really packs an emotional punch, one that I was definitely not expecting but that made the story all the more poignant due to its nature. I will say that perhaps it was just timing, having read this after all I went through with my father and father-in-law last year, but I think that is why it hit me the way it did and allowed me the patience to read this story when I did. It is a bit slow at times, but I found I needed it to be. I needed time to take it in bit by bit and not be overwhelmed all at once with what was happening.
I love books that explore memory in any fashion and this one does so in quite a few different ways. First, you have the memories of someone who is fighting a disease that specifically targets memory. And then you have other people’s memories of the same incident from long ago. The way these two played against each other, with secrets that had been buried trying to come out kept me glued to the pages, wondering what was going to be uncovered and how it would impact the current events – that of the murder investigation going on.
Written with care, this atmospheric mystery is not one to be missed!
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