Keith Miles is probably best recognised by readers under the pen name of Edward Marston. He writes several well-received historical mysteries spanning the 11th century through to the 19th century. His website is www.edwardmarston.com
Freddy Power is working at the fish counter in a Liverpool supermarket when she receives an email from a school friend with whom she has lost touch. Its message is stark – Your mum is ill. Mags x.
It’s twenty-two years since Freddy was thrown out of the family home by an irate father who’d just learned that his daughter was gay. During that time, she hasn’t been back to Newhaven even though her father is now dead. Feeling impelled to return at last, she doesn’t even bother to tell Sarah, her partner, where she is going. When Freddy reaches Newhaven, all four Mermaids are in the same place once more.
The narrative moves between Freddy from the fish counter, Mags, a librarian, and Toni, a Detective Inspector in the Sussex Constabulary, giving the reader a shifting perspective on events. When a report comes in of a boy racer crashing his car against a concrete block, Toni rushes to the scene and discovers that the driver, now dead, was the son of Karen Munday, a former Mermaid who used to persecute Toni during her childhood. Though they now live in the same town, Toni has made no effort to contact Karen but she can’t avoid doing so now. When she calls at the house to pass on the grim news, she finds that her old enemy has been murdered.
This novel examines the inability of the three women to shake off the past and its ugly secrets. Freddy nurses a deeply-felt hostility. Mags is hobbled by Catholic guilt. And Toni - notwithstanding her duty to enforce the law - can’t outgrow her adolescent delight in shoplifting. Having met as Convent girls, they formed a society of Mermaids, based on their obsession with the Disney film, The Little Mermaid, in which the Princess of Atlantica is fascinated by the human world above the waves. She longs to receive “the kiss of true love” that will enable her to live permanently as a human being. It’s no accident that fish and water are also dominant features of a story that plumbs the darker aspects of its characters and builds inexorably to a terrific climax aboard a trawler in a howling storm.
Lesley Thomson is on top form yet again.
