Turtle Moon was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1992. Verity is a recent divorcee who has moved with her twelve-year-old son Keith to Verity, Florida (the name coincidence is deliberate). Every May, the heat in Verity drives people crazy — divorces spike, crimes increase, turtles cross the roads to lay their eggs, and something in the air turns ordinary unhappiness into desperation.
A neighbor is murdered. Her baby disappears. Keith, the troubled twelve-year-old, vanishes on the same night — along with the dead woman’s baby. Julian Cash, a local police detective whose own childhood was marked by violence and neglect, begins the search. Julian and Verity (the woman, not the town) are drawn together by the investigation — two people broken by their pasts finding connection through the urgent need to save children.
Hoffman writes Florida as a character: the heat, the turtles, the tropical vegetation, the way the landscape itself seems to encourage transformation and madness. The novel mixes her characteristic magical elements (animals that seem to communicate, a sense of fate operating through coincidence) with a tightly plotted mystery whose resolution is both surprising and inevitable.
Collecting Turtle Moon
First edition (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1992): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $10–$20