Posy's Tide

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Somebody is scaring the seals off the island before dawn. Posy Hartley wants the surveyor's name, and his boat. THE MERROW BAY SISTERS · BOOK FIVE Posy Hartley has sea-green hair, a PhD on seals, and four older sisters who have each, one after another, fallen in love in Merrow Bay. Posy has no time for that. She has counted the grey seals on the north beach of Merrow Island every summer morning since she was nine, and now a Newcastle company wants that wild end of the island for twenty-four luxury eco-lodges with hot tubs. The man writing the environmental survey ties up his boat at the old stone jetty at dawn. Magnus Halcrow is a Shetland marine surveyor with a broken nose and very bad coffee, and he writes down exactly what he measures. Posy marches down the jetty and demands his name and his boat. He tells her the bank owns two thirds of the boat. Then he asks to see her notebook. Because on fourteen mornings the seals have gone before sunrise. Somebody is flying a drone over the beach in the half-light. Somebody is raking out the little terns' nests and stealing the cameras, so the survey will find nothing worth saving. Then, in thick fog, the engines of Magnus's boat die three hundred metres off a reef. Now Posy and Magnus have a tide table, a lighthouse keeper's exercise book and a clause nobody has read since 1974. They also have one chance, on the morning the midsummer spring tide comes in over the causeway. • A warm, funny seaside romance with a real mystery, set on the Northumberland coast in June. • Sensual, not explicit. Seals, terns, a lifeboat, and five sisters. • The fifth and final book of The Merrow Bay Sisters; reads on its own.