THE MERMAID MYSTERY

A wacky plan to save a town leads to big trouble.

Tidal Shores, South Carolina, has never recovered economically from the Covid-19 pandemic. Now a group calling itself the Big Ten has come up with a novel way to revive the coastal town. Taxidermist Gunner Jones melds together the body of an albino female bonobo with the bottom of a goliath tigerfish and calls it a mermaid. The idea is for Miss Lucy to be found washed up on the beach, making Tidal Shores famous and enabling the town residents to sell mermaid-related merchandise. Following the truism that a sucker is born every minute, boat captain Hoyt Hunter will take people out and convince them that the dolphins that follow his boat are mermaids. Pledged to silence about the genesis of Miss Lucy, the Big Ten soon convince a sizable segment of the population that mermaids exist and start raking in money hand over fist. Zoe Porter, a reporter for theObserver Today, lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is the great-granddaughter of Big Ten member Georgina Legare, aka Gan-Gan. Arriving in Tidal Shores to cover the mermaid craze before the TV talk show Dr Pat and Pal blows it open, she stays with Gan-Gan and takes in the show’s taping, which is quite a spectacle. Determined to expose the fake mermaid, Zoe finds that it’s not easy to overturn a big lie. When Jones is murdered, Zoe turns sleuth to catch his killer.

A hilarious tale with some serious wisdom about how easy it is to create a cult that refuses to believe the truth.