When I was growing up, the Bermuda Triangle was one of those topics that was seemingly everywhere (along with quicksand and spontaneous combustion -- stop, drop, and roll, anyone?). So when I read the blurb for Beyond the Moonlit Sea and saw that it was about a pilot disappearing over the so-called Devil's Triangle, I had to add it to my TBR. That was three years ago, so it's high time I crossed it off the list.
For all the time it sat on my Kindle shelf, it took me very little time to read this 354-page long story. (The audiobook is just shy of 10 hours if you prefer to listen.) While I was captivated by the story as a whole, I felt like the blurb was misleading. As such, I was not prepared for what the novel was really about, which I think is worth mentioning this early in my review since it is a key factor in my final thoughts.
Here's what I thought the book was going to be about: a woman's husband goes missing while he's flying over the Bermuda Triangle, and in the aftermath she connects with a female scientist who is studying the area to investigate, and they potentially solve the mystery. I didn't know whether this would incorporate some type of parallel universe or whatever, but I was definitely expecting the two women to at least interact.
Spoiler alert -- they never even meet.
The book is actually about Olivia's husband, Dean, who really does disappear while flying over the Bermuda Triangle. Melanie is writing her physics dissertation on why planes disappear in the triangle, but she goes missing years before Dean's disappearance. Olivia doesn't know about Melanie until her body is discovered in the woods years after Dean's disappearance and detectives question her about Dean having been Melanie's therapist back before they got married.
So this book is really about Dean, but I didn't know that going into it, and I found myself pivoting and rearranging my expectations many times throughout my reading. I also think it's important to note before I get into the nitty gritty of the review that this story is not 100 percent linear. While this works for establishing the main overall conflict of the story, it was one of the bigger contributing factors for why my expectations kept shifting.
As always, skip to the end of the post to avoid spoilers.
***Spoilers**
The story begins in 1990 on the night that Dean disappears. He and his wife, Olivia, get into an argument when he accepts a last-minute pilot gig for a celebrity, and he misses dinner with Olivia's family. While he is flying back home over the Bermuda Triangle, Dean's plane vanishes from radar. Search and rescue efforts turn up nothing, and it's presumed the plane crashed and Dean perished.
Olivia, meanwhile, cannot accept that Dean is dead. She becomes obsessed with the Bermuda Triangle and learning everything she can about it. She finally gives up her obsession when she discovers that she is pregnant and moves back to New York City with her mother. This is all established within the first seven chapters.
For the first ten chapters, we jump back and forth between Olivia in 1990 and Melanie in 1986. In chapter 10, we land solidly in 1986 and stay there until chapter 23. Those 13 chapters are told mostly from Dean and Melanie's points of view until the final two chapters of this section where we move back to Olivia. From there, the remainder of the book is told from Olivia's point of view with the exception of the next to last chapter.
Before he was a pilot, Dean was a grief counselor. Melanie became his patient after the death of her mother kind of derailed her from the work she was doing on her dissertation about why planes go missing over the Bermuda Triangle. It becomes apparent early on in their 'relationship' that Melanie is obsessive, and Dean quickly becomes her new obsession. He resists her advances at first because having a relationship with a patient is illegal and would end his career. But then he suffers a great loss and gives in to the temptation.
Melanie stops her therapy, but there are still rules and regulations about dating a former patient, so their relationship must be conducted in secret. There's no actual love in this relationship; it's all a classic case of erotic transference and countertransference. But Dean is trapped in what has truly become a toxic relationship and sees no way out without ruining his career.
It's during these five or six months that Dean meets Olivia, also through his therapy practice, except she's not a patient. She is a film student working on a documentary about grief, and Dean's boss volunteers him to give an interview for the film. Dean and Olivia's attraction and connection is instant, and Olivia invites him to several different events.
So essentially, Dean is dating Olivia at the same time as he's stuck in this situation with Melanie. When he decides to man up and end things, Melanie goes off the deep end. She literally pushes him out of her second floor apartment and tries to push him down the stairs. Dean grabs her shoulders to try to stop himself from falling, but they both end up going down. Melanie dies in the accident, and instead of calling the police, Dean decides to cover it up and hides her body.
A few days after that, Olivia is confronted by her parents about her relationship with Dean. Her family is wealthy and well-known, and her father hired someone to look into Dean's background. It all boils down to her parents not believing he's good enough for Olivia, that he just wants her for her money. Here's where Olivia earned my respect. She basically tells her parents to shove it, even when her dad tells her he'll cut her off.
She and Dean get married pretty much immediately after that episode and move to Miami where she encourages him to pursue his childhood dream of being a pilot. Fast forward to 1990, and you know what happens. Dean takes the job flying a celebrity to an island in the Bermuda Triangle and never makes it back home.
Olivia ends up moving back to New York City where she's determined to raise her daughter alone. Eventually she reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Gabriel, and they rekindle a deeper kind of relationship. They marry and have two more children.
In 1997, Melanie's body is discovered in a shallow grave in New Jersey. Police suspect foul play. Detectives come to question Olivia about Dean's connection to Melanie, of which she knows nothing about due to Dean never discussing his patients with her. Turns out, Melanie was pregnant at the time of her death, and in their course of their investigation, the detectives have reason to suspect Dean. Although she can't believe Dean capable of such a thing, Olivia agrees to give the detectives a pair of Dean's old gloves for DNA testing to determine if he was the father. The test comes back positive, which causes Olivia to completely change the way she thinks about her late husband.
Then in 2012, Olivia and Dean's daughter, Rose, does one of those ancestry DNA tests and discovers she has a younger half sister in Australia, which shouldn't be possible. Turns out Susie's mother had a one night stand with a tour boat captain and decided she wanted to raise Susie on her own. The description she gives of the man matches Dean. So Olivia and Rose travel to Australia to meet Susie and her mother to try to confirm if it is in fact Dean.
Here's the biggest spoiler of the entire book: Dean has been alive the entire time. Living in Australia operating a tour boat business. While he knew about Susie and that Olivia had remarried and had children, he did not know that Rose was his daughter.
Olivia understandably confronts him about everything -- Melanie and his fake disappearance. Dean admits that he had planned his disappearance in advance and had just been waiting for the right moment. He believed that he wasn't good enough for Olivia and didn't deserve to start a family with her. He also tells her the truth about what happened with Melanie, including that he did not know Melanie was pregnant and his belief that Melanie also didn't know. He agrees to go back to New York and turn himself in and finally assuage the guilt he's been living with for more than twenty years.
The book ends with an epilogue set five years in the future. Dean is serving time for what happened with Melanie; Rose goes to visit him occasionally. Rose and her half sister have become best friends and are working as nurses at the same hospital. And Olivia and Gabriel are still happily married.
***End Spoilers***
Final thoughts -- I would give Beyond the Moonlit Sea 3.5 stars, which is in line with its Amazon and Goodreads ratings. Again, I feel like if the blurb was a little bit clearer, then my expectations would have been different, and my rating probably would be higher.
I thought there was some nice symbolism in this book, although I'm not sure if it was intentional. I felt like the Bermuda Triangle was a nice representation of the toxic love triangle Dean was trapped in. There was also a good bit of foreshadowing, although I didn't recognize it at the time because I was expecting a much different story than the one I got.
There was a tiny bit of history in this book that was interesting surrounding the reason behind why Melanie was studying the Bermuda Triangle. She mentions that her grandfather was in the Flight 19 disappearance, which actually happened. On December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy bombers disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle; thirteen crew members who were part of the search and rescue efforts were lost later in the same day. Oh, and in case you were wondering -- Melanie doesn't solve the mystery of why planes disappear there.
Overall I find myself disappointed in this book and ultimately would not recommend it.
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