The Brighton Mermaid by Dorothy KoomsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
My thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Cornerstone for the opportunity to read this ARC.
A tangled, intriguing web spread across twenty-five years in my home city of Brighton and Hove. The setting is realistic, the locations are authentic. I know them all - not so much the beach where teenagers Nell and Jude stumble across the body of a young woman at the waterline. It is 1993. She has an intricate tattoo of a mermaid, the only distinguishing feature, and inevitably becomes know as the Brighton mermaid. Three weeks later Jude disappears. The crime is not solved and Jude is never found. Wind on 25 years and Nell is obsessed with solving the identity of the Brighton mermaid and finding her friend, Jude.
Nell has saved enough to take a year off work in order to carry on her investigation using genealogy and DNA profiling to try and find a familial link. Her sister suffers with OCD, for reasons that become apparent in the plot, and is constantly irritated with Nell's determination to seek a solution to the 25 year old mystery. It puts them in harms way. Someone doesn't want the truth to be revealed....
Other characters are drawn into a plot that spools backwards and forwards through the timeline. A slow burner that picks up pace and leads to a breathtaking climax.
Well worth a read.
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