Halo Around the Moon by Matt Ritter

Thank you NetGalley for access to this early copy in exchange for this review. 

All opinions here are my own about the book.

From the Back Cover

In his intriguing and unexpected second novel, Biology Professor Matt Ritter delivers a strange and startling generational tale of hardship and triumph in the American West. Natural science blends with history, and an unforeseen chain of causation emerges. In current day Los Angeles, UCLA Professor Marcus Melter is called to the scene of a gruesome murder by his friend, Detective Jack Bratton. While the case leads them into a mysterious world of crime and conspiracy, we learn about the bizarre history of these two men’s connected families. Ritter uses his keen natural history observations and unerring sense of place to spin a haunting narrative of intertwined families moving between continents and across the American West, each ultimately affecting the other’s path. Marcus and Jack become the axis around which Ritter spins an interconnected story of time, cause and effect, and small random occurrences that create sweeping changes in the world. Earthworms’ arboreal genocide, death at the headwaters of the Los Angeles River, the courtship of a hawk, the growth of California walnuts, a mutiny on an 18th-century French warship; all strands of an intricate and convoluted web bridging the gap of time and space. Halo around the Moon is a modern-day-mystery of chance encounters, old family secrets, and a tangled history of coincidental past and present events set in the danger and turmoil of a Los Angeles crime investigation.

Halo Around the Moon by Matt Ritter

Though the genre is different and there are absolutely no similarities to A Series of Unfortunate events, still the books convoluted plot lines which intersect with sickening regularity and single mindedness reminds me of the series for sheer grit in the storyline while the grip on occasions tends to let loose. 

This book is the great grandfather of a series of trivial circumstances and happenings brought together into a story. Some of the detailing will make a normal guy's head spin and he would need an accountant and ERP software to keep track of all the oddities or just skip pages and understand the gist. I do not like to skip and cannot afford a qualified help so did the grunt work all by myself, sometimes going back pages to re-read and collate. 

Books are supposed to be fun, this one made me work. But the wonder is in the detailing. so much of the information overload makes the book much more interesting than the actual storyline. So this is one cake where the icing is everything.

In the end the story turns out fine and I finished the book at a fair pace so it was intriguing but I still feel that it is not an absolute belter. The book needed some more editing and maybe some lesser number of chapters would make reading better. 

But in toto this is a cerebral book on murders and family histories spread over several timelines. 

I commend the author for this piece of work. 

I thank NetGalley for the opportunity to get an early taste of this book in exchange for a frank review. 

4 stars for this effort.

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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5033475847