Death of a Mermaid by Lesley Thomson
Genre: Crime fiction, Mystery, LGBT
Read: 4th October 2020
Published: 7th May 2020
★ 1 star
DESCRIPTION:
When Freddy Power was eighteen, her father threw her out. Her sin had been to fall in love with a woman. Freddy waited for two decades to be invited back into the family. The summons never came.
But now, in the wake of her parents' death, Freddy feels the call of home like a siren's song. The ferry from France emerging out of the mist. Fisherman unloading trawlers down at the harbour. Her childhood friends, Mags and Toni, walking on the cliffs at sunset.
Yet when she arrives in Newhaven, she finds that time has not stood still. After twenty-two years of silence, her brothers exclude her, and Mags and Toni feel like strangers. But then Mags goes missing, and old secrets – and old passions – are reignited. Freddy is determined to lead the hunt for the woman who was her first love. Even if it means confronting the past, and facing up to the truth about her family.
MY REVIEW:
I really tried to like this book but I just couldn't get into it. I found it more to do with the friendships - or lack of - of three women who had grown up together and were known as the Mermaids, due to their love of the Disney movie "The Little Mermaid". Rather than crime or murder. I didn't find it so much a thriller as I had hoped.
The three girls - Freddy, Mags and Toni - all attended a convent as adolescents and when Toni's father was murdered she was welcomed into the secret group as a mermaid and existing member Karen was shafted out. Needless to say there was no love lost between Karen and the girls.
Twenty five years later, Toni and Mags are still in Newhaven as is Karen. But Freddy escaped two decades ago to Liverpool where she has lived and worked since. I'm not sure why she was banished from her family, except maybe for the fact that she was gay. I don't know, because I didn't get that far into the book to find out. But I did get the impression that it was because of that. So when she receives a text from Mags to say her mother was ill, Freddy is stunned. She hasn't heard from Mags in two decades. Still, Freddy decides to return home to Newhaven...leaving her somewhat passive aggressive abusive partner Sarah behind. Her return to Newhaven is not welcomed by her younger brother Ricky, but her older brother still holds a soft spot for their older sibling. Sadly Freddy arrives just a moment too late, her mother having passed away that morning.
Toni is now a Detective Inspector with the police and she is called to an accident involving two teenagers who have crashed head on into a concrete pillion. The driver, a 16 year old boy, she recognises as Daniel Tyler who Ricky Power apprenticed on his fishing trawler. He is also the teenage son of Karen Munday, a former Mermaid shafted out when Toni joined. A job she usually delegates to uniform or her DS, Toni decides to break the news to Karen herself. But upon arriving at her dishevelled house, she finds the front door open, the kitchen hob still warm...and Karen on the toilet with her trousers and pants around her knees. Assuming she had crashed out where she now sat, Toni instinctively felt for a pulse...and was surprised to find none. Karen was dead. A stroke? A heart attack? The possibilities ran through Toni's head...until she saw the familiar bruising of ligature marks around her neck. Karen was murdered.
Mags lives a relatively quiet life in Newhaven working at the local library. Listening to the ramblings of locals and keeping up with the current gossip as she scanned books for lending. She has remained friends with the Powers, even after Freddy's departure, and had considered the family matriarch a kind of second mother. She returned to the house to find the once stoic woman barely clinging to life. Although she had text Freddy to say her mother was ill, she didn't let on just how ill she was. She never said she was dying and she wondered whether she should have.
It wasn't too long after this that I gave up. I know Mags held a special place in Freddy's heart, giving the impression that she was her "first love". But then Mags disappears. What happens from then on, I have no idea. I just couldn't connect with the characters. I felt nothing for them. And the story just didn't engage me which was surprising as I have read some of Thomson's other works in the Detective's Daughter series and thoroughly enjoyed them. But this one I found boring. Didn't seem to fit in the thriller genre but felt more like a bad soap.
I seem to be in the minority as I see many 4 and 5 star reviews for the book. Maybe I gave up too early...I don't know...but my motto is "Life is too short to waste time on books you don't enjoy".
I would like to thank #LesleyThomson, #NetGalley and #HeadOfZeus for an ARC of #DeathOfAMermaid in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Lesley Thomson was born and brought up in Hammersmith, a few paces from the District Line in West London. She graduated from Brighton University in 1981 then moved to Sydney, Australia. In between writing her first attempt at a novel, she sold newspapers in a shop at Wynyard underground station in the heart of the city. She says that "if you want to know a city, get familiar with it’s subterranean transit system" and that "until then she had never seen a double-decker train".
Returning to London, Lesley did several jobs to support her writing. This included working for one of the first Internet companies in the UK. Her first novel, 'Seven Miles From Sydney', came out in 1987 when it made the 'City Limits' top ten best books. In 1990 she also worked with actor Sue Johnston on her semi-autobiographical book, 'Hold Onto The Messy Times'.
While reading for an MA in English Literature at Sussex University Lesley wrote 'A Kind of Vanishing'. It won the People’s Book prize for fiction in 2010.
Lesley is also a guest tutor on the Creative Writing and Publishing MA at West Dean where with top crime writer Elly Griffiths, she also runs a crime-writing short course. She leads workshops and take master classes on writing crime novels.
Also writing her best-selling The Detective’s Daughter series, featuring Stella Darnell (MD of Clean Slate Cleaning Services) and Jack Harmon, driver on London Underground’s District Line. Oh, and not forgetting Stanley the poodle.
Lesley divides her time between East Sussex and Gloucestershire, living with my partner and a raggedy poodle.
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