Hello everyone!
Okay, a big fangirl squeal LOL.
Serenity Woods has basically won me over with her wonderful writing, lovely characters, and the best part of all, PEOPLE COMMUNICATING LIKE THE ADULTS THEY ARE, not just running off at the first sign of trouble.
So naturally, if she says there's something new on the horizon, I'm going to sit up and pay attention.
For the past year or so, maybe a little more, she's also been writing as Hermione Moon, and her genre were cozy paranormal romance mysteries, which is what she returned to for the time being.
After all, there can never be enough of mystery and romance!
On the Stroke of Midlife is the first book in her new Moonlight Moonshine series, and this is what it's about.
I will be linking some of her other works down below because I'm incredibly lucky enough to be part of her ARC team, which means I receive a copy of an incoming book just a little before everyone else. Isn't that just the best thing ever???
So anyway, here's how it goes:
Cat Clark, recently divorced at 45, moves to the village of Crows Tor on Dartmoor where she will be teaching at the local primary school, and where she has her high school best friend to lean back on. She's helped in the move by her children, Matt and Alicia, and right after arriving (or almost right after), she spends the evening with previously mentioned best friend, Fiona, who gives her something else besides regular whisky.
She gives her Moonshine, aka, this one's made from water collected under the full moon, and enhances any kind of dormant powers you might have. Well, witchy ones really.
Fiona herself is a healer - if she places her hands on someone and concentrates, she can help make them feel better. Cat though, she's always had a bit of precognition, and funnily enough she's impersonating a fortune teller the next day at the village fair.
Turns out, she can ACTUALLY see the future.
She also sees someone dead.
This freaks her out so she and her son Matt go to try and find Emilia, her fellow teacher, and end up discovering her body, which launches us into the central part of the book.
Fiona's husband, Jack, is the local DI on the case, but Cat offers to ask around a little and see if she can learn something more, on the premise that people might not want to talk to the police. Her love interest, Nathan, kind of agrees with her - but first, a little about Nathan.
Nathan is one of the local paramedics who rushes to the scene when the body's found, and immediately takes an interest in Cat, and actually the two spy one another earlier when she's in a taxi going home and he's out walking his boxer. Anyway, he asks her out to dinner despite the circumstances, as both of them agree it would be a shame to waste any time.
So Cat goes to dinner with him where the waiter suggests Nathan might have been there a week earlier with a different woman, something he denies, unconcerned.
As her love life slowly blooms again (her ex-husband, who complained that she wasn't paying him any attention but focused solely on their children, has found himself a side-piece, and she's now pregnant, plus he's a general douche who apparently wasn't interested at all in what Cat's hobbies and likes are, also freezing her out when she tries to tell him about her visions) she begins her investigation, asking the crystal ball she initially had visions in to help.
The first vision she receives leads her to the primary school, along with the number three, where she learns Emilia wasn't as universally liked as it might have seemed at first. She was, however, extremely busy, part of a drama club, tennis club, you name it, she was probably there, and got a higher paid position even though she wasn't necessarily the one qualified for it.
The second vision in a church has Cat meeting Emilia's widowed husband and then sends her to the theater where she learns Emilia was supposed to star as Juliet opposite to William King, the Romeo, who happens to be her neighbour. Finally, her last vision takes her to the tennis club, where it's revealed someone broke the woman's racket, and the reason she was headed up to the tennis courts on the fateful day she died was to replace it.
Even as Cat makes friends with fellow historian and museum employee Ava, who takes her up to the field Emilia and her husband owned and where a very important archaeological find is unveiled, she realizes Emilia was having an affair with William King - the man the waiter mistakes Nathan for back at the restaurant.
But did William kill her, is the question?
As her two children head back to university and she's left on her own, she continues her sleuthing AND her relationship with Nathan, though at that point in her mind Nathan is also a suspect, not that there's any real connection there, but anyway, William King reveals he was deeply in love with Emilia and would never kill her.
There's also the fact that the woman left a travel agency all flustered at one point, so the clues are coming together when Cat takes an old May King and Queen picture from 19 years ago when Emilia won and takes it to the former head teacher. She's also had one last vision, a locket with ginger hair which points to the only girl she remembers with that colour, who just so happens to be William's daughter.
Turns out, it's all about love.
See, 19 years ago, Emilia and William were an item, but another girl, Hannah, was insanely jealous and wanted him for herself, so she spread a lie that William was seeing someone else, which precipitated the break-up, and she could swoop in. But Emilia kept getting what Hannah wanted - first William, then a job she also applied for, the role of Juliet, that sort of thing. Eventually, Emilia's daughter won May Queen instead of Hannah's, in a bout of history repeating itself, plus Hannah learned of the affair which prompted her to go after Emilia and wallop her with her own tennis racket.
This caused the other woman to fall and hit her head, killing her. Hannah wanted the Three Kings (also a nod to Woods' really big series, Three Wise Men, and a carol that's hummed in this book too as an inside joke) to stay together, believing she and William were meant to be.
But William is absolutely horrified at what his wife has done, and thus the case closes, while Nathan takes Cat home and goes in for a cup of coffee.
You can bet this isn't the end of the mysteries though, because this is just the first book!
And boy, was it a lovely one.
Sprinkled throughout are references to Agatha Christie and some of her famous works, which I thoroughly enjoyed because I'm a big Christie fan myself. Cat is an immensely likeable character, if perhaps a little clumsy on occasion, but it only makes her more believable, I think. Nathan plays her counterpart well, and this isn't a story where romance would be the central focus so it's done really well to keep the reader engaged, but not to overtake the story.
The clues spread throughout are cleverly hidden and if you follow along you just might guess what happened before the actual ending, but even just reading it to relax your brain and not overthink should bring you great joy, too.
It's fun, it's not TOO gruesome, and it introduces us to the fact that women of middle age, meaning 45 and upwards, can and do still have lives, which I think a lot of people are becoming more and more aware of nowadays, as they should have always been. They aren't just for the trash after 40!
I definitely enjoyed this one with only one question mark: William is described as dark, but Nathan has silver hair, so how the waiter could mistake the two of them is a little bit confusing, however, I suppose it COULD also work.
All in all though, this book seems to have it all: it has suspense, it has mystery, there's a murder, there's gentle romance with a single father of 52, and there's the Moonshine that enhances the abilities you might have. I'm interested to see whether the second book focuses on Cat again, if she's going to be our main protagonist, or if we're going to follow another woman from the 'book club' (aka witchy coven, but don't tell anyone!).
10/10 recommend, especially on a lazy, perhaps rainy afternoon. It's a quick, easy read!
xx
*image not mine
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