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Writing in the Wild: A Guest Post by Sarah Crouch

By Sarah Crouch / March 10, 2025 at 1:42 am

Elijah’s ex-fling returns to him in a gruesome fashion — dead in his backyard. All eyes turn to him as this murder mystery unfolds, one shocking detail at a time. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Sarah Crouch on writing Middletide.

Paperback $14.99 ~~$17.99~~

Middletide: A Novel

By Sarah Crouch

In Stock Online

Paperback $14.99 ~~$17.99~~

In this gripping and intensely atmospheric debut, disquiet descends on a small town after the suspicious death of a beautiful young doctor, with all clues pointing to the reclusive young man who abandoned the community in chase of big city dreams but returned for the first love he left behind. Perfect for fans of All Good People Here and Where the Crawdads Sing.

In retrospect, the timing was ironic.

I penned Middletide, a story orbiting a mysterious death, at a time when our family was celebrating new life.

It was the summer of 2022, and I’d had two babies in quick succession. I was neck-deep in the stout tide of early parenthood, and most of my daylight hours were spent with a baby on one hip and a toddler on the other, wiping tears and noses . . . among other things.

Those are tough years.

Lonely years.

And though I was content with our family’s decision to settle down in Alabama, I suddenly found myself desperately homesick for the Pacific Northwest where I was raised.

The South has a beauty all its own, but that summer in particular, I longed for the evergreen forests of my childhood; the mossy woods teeming with old and new growth, and velveteen farmland broken by fir groves so deeply green, they are nearly black. And so, there, on Puget Sound, where the summer air smells of sweet, dying pine and distant blue foothills roll one after the other toward the Cascades, I decided to set a novel.

I’ve been a life-long insomniac, but I can say now that those pre-dawn hours I had to myself that summer were a blessing. Between three and six am, Middletide was born. While my family slept, I opened my laptop each morning and stepped back across the country into the woods of my youth. I wandered beneath the towering Douglas Firs, and dove headfirst into Elijah’s secret lake. I strolled the pleasant streets of a small town and met the people who lived there with a smile on my face.

I’d written manuscripts before, though never set in the northwest, and never crime fiction, but the setting itself was what made the decision to step into the mystery/thriller genre feel so natural. Contrast is, after all, one of the most potent arrows in any writer’s quiver. What better way to highlight shocking death than to drop it headfirst into verdant life? Moreover, the same woods that were a paradise for a young, nature-loving tomboy by day, were absolutely forbidden at night, haunted by the yips of coyotes, and full of hidden danger.

I came to life again that summer, as I spun a tale about a failed writer’s desperate bid for innocence after a woman is found dead on his property, mirroring a crime written in the pages of his book. While writing, I survived the trenches of “two under two,” and found myself on the other side with a publishing deal in hand.

My debut novel, Middletide, is a mystery and a story about a lost man coming home. It is a celebration of redemption, and the wonder of second chances, but more than anything else, it is an ode to the deep beauty of the Pacific Northwest, my first home. It is my sincerest hope that you find the same joy within its pages that I did.

-Sarah Crouch