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Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: — The Night the Bar Finally Breathes
Chapter 3: — Before the Break, a Test in Times Square
Chapter 4: — The House Without Her, the Town With Teeth
Chapter 5: — Jess’s Escape Route: San Francisco and the First Yes
Chapter 6: — Neil Bratton and the Gravity of a Ready-Made Family
Chapter 7: — The Confession That Wasn’t Hers to Make
Chapter 8: — The Missing Man Upstairs
Chapter 9: — Jess’s Terrible Solution
Chapter 10: — The Deal Under the Building
Description
The Half Moon follows Malcolm Gephardt, a lifelong bartender who finally buys his beloved hometown bar, and his wife Jess, a lawyer carrying years of fertility heartbreak and quiet resentment. When Jess abruptly leaves, Malcolm clings to the bar as his identity and salvation—only to learn she’s involved with Neil Bratton, a newly arrived divorcee with three young children.
As winter storms paralyze their town, Malcolm’s financial crisis deepens and Jess’s affair collides with the social gravity of a small community. The couple is forced into close proximity again—both emotionally and literally—while a parallel mystery unfolds: a regular at Malcolm’s bar vanishes, revealing a crime that tangles with Malcolm’s fragile livelihood. The story builds toward a reckoning about marriage, loyalty, class, ambition, and what it means to start over when the life you planned never arrived.
Who Should Listen
- Listeners who love intimate, emotionally layered domestic fiction about long marriages under pressure.
- Fans of small-town realism: community judgment, old loyalties, and private lives becoming public.
- Readers drawn to stories about infertility, grief, reinvention, and the hard choices people make to survive.