False Mermaid Book

AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR ERIN HART DELIVERS A SEARING NEW NOVEL OF SUSPENSE, BRILLIANTLY MELDING MODERN FORENSICS AND IRISH MYTH AND MYSTERY IN THIS CHARGED THRILLER.

American pathologist Nora Gavin fled to Ireland three years ago, hoping that distance from home would bring her peace. Though she threw herself into the study of bog bodies and the mysteries of their circumstances, she was ultimately led back to the one mystery she was unable to solve: the murder of her sister, Tríona. Nora can’t move forward until she goes back—back to her home, to the scene of the crime, to the source of her nightmares and her deepest regrets.

Determined to put her sister’s case to rest and anxious about her eleven-year-old niece, Elizabeth, Nora returns to Saint Paul, Minnesota, to find that her brother-in-law, Peter Hallett, is about to remarry and has plans to leave the country with his new bride. Nora has long suspected Hallett in Tríona’s murder, though there has never been any proof of his involvement, and now she believes that his new wife and Elizabeth may both be in danger. Time is short, and as Nora begins reinvestigating her sister’s death, missed clues and ever-more disturbing details come to light. What is the significance of the "false mermaid" seeds found on Tríona’s body? Why was her behavior so erratic in the days before her murder?

Is there a link between Tríona’s death and that of another young woman?

Nora’s search for answers takes her from the banks of the Mississippi to the cliffs of Ireland, where the eerie story of a fisherman’s wife who vanished more than a century ago offers up uncanny parallels. As painful secrets come to light, Nora is drawn deeper into a past that still threatens to engulf her and must determine how much she is prepared to sacrifice to put one tragedy to rest . . . and to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself.

Publishers Weekly

As in Hart’s Haunted Ground and Lake of Sorrows, the bittersweet Celtic otherworld haunts her outstanding third tale of family sorrows centered on the ancient mystery of what keeps a woman in a bad relationship. After three years of studying Irish “bog people,” corpses preserved in peat fields, Nora Gavin realizes she has to leave Ireland for Saint Paul, Minn., her childhood home, to prove that her architect brother-in-law, Peter Hallett, who’s about to remarry, murdered her sister, Tríona, five years earlier. A desire to protect Tríona’s 11-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, from Peter’s savagery also motivates her. Woven deftly into Nora’s real-world mission are the old Irish selkie stories, tales of seals who shape-change into women, marry for love, and find themselves tragically caught between two worlds, a duality Hart suggests is deeply embedded in humanity. Many readers will find this passionate, complex novel almost impossible to put down. (Mar.)