A Deadly Mermaid Fetish

Description

A dead girl, dressed in a tattered mermaid costume and a harpoon jutting from her chest, washes ashore on a world-renowned beach in Florida, bringing with it a nightmare of evil the City of Sarasota has never known. Chief Homicide Detective Miranda Morales, recently returned from a forced, yearlong sabbatical, leads the investigation that rocks the sedate arts and cultural mecca of the snowbirds who flock to the region in their lavish yachts and private jets, as well as the locals who resent the intrusion. When she and her devoted partner, Detective Matt Selva, arrive at the crime scene, the image of the dead girl transports her back to a time when she and her sister, as young children, would dress up like mermaids at their family’s posh home on Longboat Key, and opens painful memories of her sister’s decade-old suicide. Torn between duty and denial, she reluctantly attends a cocktail party hosted by her parents honoring the man who she'd hoped would propose. That decision catapults her into a world where people, unmasked, reveal a sordid underbelly of greed, power, obsession, and inhumanity, too close to home, unraveling a tapestry where all that glitters turns toxic, and deadly. Pamela Mones is an award-winning journalist, recently retired after more than a decade with Chesapeake Publishing Corporation. An avid fan of murder mysteries, the idea for A Deadly Mermaid Fetish spawned after attending a class on writing murder mysteries. Her lifelong intrigue with the sea, combined with a fascination for mermaids, drew her to feature a mermaid as the victim. Having been immersed much of her adult life a world of antique dealers and people passionate about collecting rare and priceless objects, she turned the threads for her murder mystery into her debut novel. This debut novel introduces a subject rarely explored in today’s fiction – human trafficking – where wealth can buy anything but love, and passion-turned-obsession can be deadly. Homicide detectives Miranda Morales and Matt Selva, and coroner Dr. Jonathan Rubens, are fresh characters who display an extraordinary working relationship as they tackle a world filled with monsters capable of unimaginable horrors, while they, too, must confront their own demons as they navigate the dark underworld where nightmares are born. A Deadly Mermaid Fetish captures the essence of how power, greed, and disregard for the sanctity of human life exists where we least expect, and closer to home than we think. ‘I see this book as a movie,’ said a former copy editor at the New York Times after reading an early draft of the novel.

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