After six months without any mysteries to investigate and funds running out, a captain soaked to the skin blows in to Shilly’s and Anna's world. A month before, he had a terrible dream; the day before he discovers it has come true. A nightmare. A man's body found torn to pieces on the rocky shoreline of the Cornwall coast. He believes that man is his long-lost brother, murdered. But there is a strangeness surrounding the circumstances of the death, of a woman's anguished and unnerving cry which calls to those who can hear her and draws them to the deadly shore. Answers need to be found before they vanish back into the sea along with the one who called him there.

The Mermaid's Call is a beautiful book of a dark and lonely place, and darker doings, told in Ms Stansfield's poetic, evocative prose. Within heartbeats of reading the first sentence you are transported to a world where the rich and the poor face each other across a brutal abyss; where the expanse of hope and hopelessness is tangible, and the difference between society's stance on right and wrong is at best, vague, and at worst, meaningless.

The atmosphere of the forlorn, poverty-stricken hamlet of Morwenstow overseen by its wealthy vicar and his menagerie of cats seeps from the pages, drawing one in to a place so authentic and real, it leaves its tattoo in one's heart long after the last page is read and the book is closed.