Firefly Cove is the second in Davis Bunn’s Miramar Bay series.

Lucius Quarterfield lived in the 1960s and developed pleurisy when he was seven. The illness damaged his heart to the point that doctors did not give him long to live.

Though often weak and in pain, when Lucius was grown, he bought a small automobile dealership, which eventually turned into a chain.

He fell in love with a woman named Jessica, who was opposite from him in almost every way. However, since he knew he would die young, he felt it was best to pull away, to spare Jessica the pain of losing him.

After eleven months, he wants to see her and drives back to Miramar. His worst fears are realized when he has a heart attack and dies in her arms.

But then he wakes up in a cold room with a sheet over his face. People call him Luke, not Lucius. His hands and face are not his own. He discovers the date is almost fifty years ahead of his own time.

Nothing in the book’s descriptions said anything about this, and the other books in the series that I have read so far don’t have any kind of supernatural or science fiction elements. So it was jarring. Maybe the author wanted it to be as disorienting to the reader as it would have been to the character.

I don’t believe in reincarnation because Hebrews 9:27 says, “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” There’s also nothing in Scripture about any human inhabiting any other human’s body. From what I have read of the author, I think he believes the same way. So I am not sure why he would have this occur in his story.

I decided to view the situation as a plot device, just like other impossibilities such as time travel.

In Lucius’s situation, the young man whose body he woke up in had just attempted his third try at suicide. His therapist’s supervisor is ready to have him locked up. He would be even more ready if Lucius told him he had actually lived fifty years before. All Lucius wants to do is find out what happened to Jessica.

Luke’s therapist, a Persian young woman named Asha, notices several differences about him right away. He looks the same but carries himself differently, speaks differently, and has even lost his French-Canadian accent. She and her supervisor think Luke’s “near death experience” led to Dissociative Identity Disorder, or a split personality. Yet he doesn’t manifest certain hallmarks of that illness.

At it’s heart, this book is a love story, though an unconventional one. The story was well-written. We’re drawn in as Lucius’s situation slowly unfolds, figuring out modern gadgets and ways, what kind of man Luke was, how he should proceed, what his future should look like. The characters were well-developed–besides Lucius, I particularly liked Asha and her grandmother. The intrigue of what’s going to happen to Luke–will he ever find Jessica, what will he do when he does, will he be able to avoid being committed to an institution, will anyone else ever believe his story–keeps us engaged, as does Asha’s story. I’m still processing what I think about the book. Even though I normally wouldn’t care for this kind of story, I found it engaging.

I’m inclined to think this might have worked better as a stand-alone novel, except that the theme of the Miramar Bay books has to do with second chances.

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