The High Tide Club

The High Tide Club is Mary Kay Andrews’s 2018 novel, set primarily on a fictional barrier island off the coast of Georgia and built around the kind of multigenerational family mystery and contemporary romance plotting that Andrews has been refining across her southern fiction catalogue. The novel centers on Brooke Trappnell, a young single mother and lawyer who has been summoned to the secluded private island of the elderly Josephine Bettendorf Warrick. Josephine is dying and has decided to make right whatever wrongs she committed against three women whose lives intersected with hers during her wild years in the 1940s.

Josephine engages Brooke to track down the descendants of the three women, the original High Tide Club of the title, and to bring them to the island so that Josephine can talk to them before she dies. As Brooke pursues the assignment, she becomes drawn into the wider history of the island and of the Bettendorf family, with a long buried murder mystery from the 1940s slowly coming back to the surface alongside the contemporary romance plot that develops between Brooke and a local lawyer named Gabe Wynant.

Mary Kay Andrews handles the situation with her characteristic warmth and humor. The Georgia coastal setting is rendered with affection and specific detail, the southern social codes are handled with knowing precision, and the wider cast of contemporary and historical characters give the novel additional energy beyond just the central pairing. The plot moves between the contemporary thread and the historical material across the page count, with the slow building reveals about what actually happened on the island in the 1940s landing with the kind of emotional payoff her readers come to her for.

What distinguishes Mary Kay Andrews from a lot of writers in her general territory is the affection she feels for the southern settings she works in. The Georgia coast is rendered with the kind of love that only a writer who actually knows these places can produce, and the various supporting characters from the local island community give the novel additional warmth beyond just the central mystery.

The High Tide Club is one of the entries in Andrews’s catalogue that pushes her further into multigenerational mystery territory than her earlier comic novels typically did, while still keeping the central warmth and humor that her readers expect. For longtime Mary Kay Andrews fans, the novel is one of the stronger late entries. For new readers, the standalone nature of the plot makes it an accessible introduction to her work.