#Titanuary ‘Half Moon Bay’ by Alice La Plante

About the book…

A smart, haunting tale of psychological suspense from the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of Turn of Mind.

Jane loses everything when her teenage daughter is killed in a senseless accident. Jane is devastated, but sometime later, she makes one tiny stab at a new life: she moves from San Francisco to the tiny seaside town of Half Moon Bay. She is inconsolable, and yet, as the months go by, she is able to cobble together some version of a job, of friends, of the possibility of peace.

And then, children begin to disappear. And soon, Jane sees her own pain reflected in all the parents in the town. She wonders if she will be able to live through the aching loss, the fear all around her. But as the disappearances continue, she begins to see that what her neighbors are wondering is if it is Jane herself who has unleashed the horror of loss.

Half Moon Bay is a chilling story about a mother haunted by her past. As Stewart O’Nan said about Turn of Mind—this novel “blindfolds the reader and spins her around.”

Published by Titan in 2018,‘Half Moon Bay’ is a thriller quite unlike any I have read before. It took me a while to get into it, it’s written in the present tense and there are no chapters. The dialogue is written in italics in the block of text on each page, so it was, for this dyslexic reader, a bit of a challenge to deep dive into the story.

Not having a definitive place to stop, for people like me who read specifically to the end of each chapter left me with a growing sense of frustration of not being able to properly step back from Jane’s narrative. It was annoying and I had to go back a few times to the book, but when I started really devoting time to it, I realised how clever this device actually is.

It gives you a sense that you are residing in Jane’s headspace, kind of like a confidante, and the pacing means that even when you aren’t reading it, you are thinking about it.

Following an ill advised revenge attack against a woman in a gated community where she lives, Jane not only lost her daughter to a car crash, her husband to the aftermath of this tragedy but also herself. Advised to move jobs from a botanical garden center to one further away, in Half Moon Bay, Jane takes her motorbike and sets herself up to a solitary existence.

Knee deep in grief, with no sense of resolution, she becomes obsessed with a memorial to an unnamed person, and , whilst attending it, she is approached by a man who kindles some emotions for the first time in years. Bumping into him again later on, and finding he has female partner, she is not really sure what situation she is getting involved in, but cannot escape the magnetism that this couple exude. As the outsiders in the town, they were bound to be noted with a healthy dose of scepticism but when a young girl goes missing, and is then found on the beach where Jane wanders the small sleepless hours away, police and public attention turns on her.

And then the second girl goes missing…

In order to work out just what is going on and clear her name, Jane is forced to go deep into her grief and wrestle with it in order to find out the truth. She is a bereaved mother, but there is no word for that, so this book takes her narrative on a path of discovery where it explores what she is, no her child is no longer here, where she belongs, without an anchor to keep her in place, and why she is so successful at growing things, yet cannot sustain herself with what she really needs.

A mystery, a character study and an exploration of the raw, non linear nature of grief, this is a slow burn of a book which pays off those determined to stay with it to the very end.

About the author…

Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer.

She also teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her fiction has been widely published in Epoch, Southwestern Review, and other literary journals. Alice is the author of five books, including the LA Times bestseller,‘Method and Madness:The Making Of A story’  (W.W. Norton 2009).

Her novel ‘Turn Of the Mind’, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2011 and won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize for 2011. She lives with her family in Northern California.

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Links-http://www.alicelaplante.com/index.htm