Beyond the Moonlit Sea by Julianne Maclean

EXCERPT: Olivia – Miami 1990

I should have known better. I shouldn’t have said the things I did.

That’s what I told myself when I learned what happened to my husband on his return flight from the US Virgin Islands. But isn’t that what we all say after something goes terribly wrong and we look back and wish we had behaved differently.

ABOUT ‘BEYOND THE MOONLIT SEA’: Olivia Hamilton is married to the love of her life, Dean, a charismatic pilot who flies private jets for the rich and famous. But when he vanishes over the Bermuda Triangle, Olivia’s idyllic existence unravels. After years of waiting, Olivia must eventually let go of the fragile hope that her beloved husband might still be alive.

Melanie Brown is a particle physicist who spends late nights studying the Bermuda Triangle. But her research interests falter when her mother dies in a tragic accident. Struggling to reboot her life and career, Melanie begins a forbidden love affair with her therapist.

When a shocking discovery shows Olivia’s and Melanie’s paths are intertwined, it casts Dean’s disappearance in a new light. The two women’s strange connection threatens to unlock secrets that will change everything Olivia thought she knew about her marriage, her husband, and most importantly, herself.

MY THOUGHTS: I am a sucker for stories about or set around the mysterious disappearances that occur in the Bermuda Triangle.

I started Beyond the Moonlit Sea with great excitement and read almost half of it in the first sitting. The storyline, which spans from 1986 through to 2017, and is told from the multiple viewpoints of Olivia, Melanie and Dean, intrigued me although I often found the writing style quite stilted and, at times, awkward.

The second half of the book became predictable, and was largely quite mundane. I found myself skimming over pages until we came to the chapters involving the DNA when my interest was again piqued, but not to the same extent it had originally.

I was expecting suspense, and didn’t get it.

Would I have liked more about the mysteries surrounding the Bermuda Triangle? Definitely. Ditto for Melanie’s thesis.

I found it quite odd that Melanie as described by her ‘friends’ to the police is vastly different from the many facets of Melanie that we see through both her own and Dean’s eyes. This information is dropped into the book, and then – nothing!

Unfortunately, this was only an okay read for me, nothing more.

⭐⭐.5

#BeyondtheMoonlitSea #NetGalley

I: @juliannemaclean @amazonpublishing

T: @Julianne MacLean @AmazonPub

#contemporaryfiction #domesticdrama #historicalfiction #mystery #romance

THE AUTHOR: Julianne Maclean loves to travel and has lived in New Zealand, Canada, and England. MacLean currently resides on the east coast of Canada in a lakeside home with her husband and daughter.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Lake Union Publishing via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Beyond the Moonlit Sea by Julianne MacLean for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review is also published on Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and Goodreads.com

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