The Brighton Mermaid

This awarding-winning tale of obsession and what lurks in the past is an unusual novel. It mines the themes of family, of friendships and of regret, but is a pure thriller - one that keeps you reading, and makes you think deeply, about what can become obscured amidst the flotsam and jetsam of our lives, and the lives of those who surround us.

With a split time-frame we commence on this tale of two teenage girls in the early 1990s, Nell Okorie and Jude Dalton. After returning in the early hours from a party, they stumble upon the body of a woman on Brighton Beach. The corpse is decorated with jewelry and a tattoo that eponymously gives rise to Koomson’s title.

The police in the shape of the unpleasant detective John Pope investigate the body on the beach, the Brighton Mermaid. There appears to be an agenda, one that perhaps is fueled by racism, as well as an urgency to restore order. The pressure upon the authorities is heightened when Jude vanishes, and what may be copycat murders appear. Further bodies of young women appear on the beach, and also become termed mermaids (linked to the tattooed woman that Jude and Nell first uncovered).

Police suspicion from Pope is focused on Nell and the Okorie family. The corrosive nature of the investigation has consequences for them all, especially Nell’s eleven-year-old sister Macy.

Then the novel flits back to present day. Nell is in her forties, and with her interests in DNA and genealogy; it feeds her obsession regarding her missing friend Jude and the body on the beach. She leaves her work to devote herself full-time to the mystery of her teenage years.  Koomson also indicates in her narrative, the effect on Nell’s little sister Macy, her anxiety and the methods she developed to cope with those events, the ones that scarred her childhood mind.

Koomson manages to knit the strands that dangle from the past to weave a narrative of complexity and insight. Less of a crime novel but more of a character-driven psychological game played between author and reader.

As Koomson is not a known figure in crime-writing circles, The Brighton Mermaid is a refreshing novel that contains few of the conventions or clichés found in books set in that genre.

Though a relatively long novel, the narrative is measured out to the reader in small chunks, metered to keep you reading well past your bedtime and then it becomes hard to sleep, for the narrative provokes much thought and existential deliberation.

In a word, ‘engaging’ but it scars the mind, like a knife wound, where it remains long after the book is confined to a memory, one that has left a mark.