February 20, 2024
What You Leave Behind by Wanda M. Morris
Lawyer Deena Wood's life is in tatters: her marriage has gone down in flames, she lost her prestigious job in Atlanta, and she is still reeling from her mother's death. She returns to her hometown of Brunswick, Georgia, where her father married her mother's close friend Ruth a few months after her mother's death. Trapped in a dead-end job, living in her childhood home, Deena is trying to re-make her life, when she encounters an elderly man living on one of the islands off the Georgia coast. When he goes missing, she feels compelled to find out what happened to him.
I don't particularly care for mysteries with a supernatural element, but if that's your jam, you'll probably like this one. For me, it was just okay. I did not find Deena to be a likeable or sympathetic character: she is almost completely self-focused (which she should have grown out of, since she's almost 40), and has little empathy for anyone else. She views her dad's second wife as someone who always coveted what her mother had. It doesn't occur to her that her dad is lonely after his wife's death, or that maybe her mom's best friend misses her too. Unbelievably, a GUY has to explain this to her.
The plot focuses on the difficulties of lower and middle income people (particularly in the South) when it comes to proving ownership and inheritance of property that has been in their families for years, yet there is no paperwork to support their claims. The author's plotting can be complicated at times. There are also a lot of characters, and it's hard to keep them all straight. I figured out about halfway through the book who the real mastermind was.
Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.
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