Book Review: The Girl Beneath the Sea
by Daniel J. Collins
“Something else is in the water.”
Imagine you are swimming in the ocean. Something brushes against your leg while you are treading water. It is most likely a piece of seaweed, but your heart stops because you know it’s a shark and suddenly the shore seems impossibly far away. Then the moment passes, you’re not eaten, and the shark of your mind transforms back to the seaweed of reality. However, in Andrew Mayne’s latest novel, The Girl Beneath the Sea, there is something in the water.
The novel begins with Sloan McPherson underwater. An archaeology PhD student and auxiliary police diver for the Lauderdale Shore Police Department, Sloan is looking for rock and fossil fragments as a favor for her PhD advisor in a deep pool in a Florida canal. While searching through the silt and mud, Sloan hears a splash and remembers her father’s advice, advice that she chose to ignore today: Never dive alone. Sloan quickly scans the area, dive knife in hand, looking for any crocodiles or alligators, and then ascends to the surface. As she surfaces, she discovers the sound of the splash.
It wasn’t a crocodile or a slithering snake.
It was a body.
A human body.
A dead body.
Dumped into the canal while I was underwater.
As one would expect in an Andrew Mayne novel, things escalate quickly for Sloan. She counts six different law enforcement agencies on the scene, including the FBI and DEA and sheriffs from three different counties—That many different agency jackets for a body in the water is unusual. Sloan learns that the girl’s body was not only dumped while Sloan was there, the girl was killed while Sloan was underwater. When a police officer asks Sloan for her identification, Sloan retrieves her wallet from her truck only to find something missing.
I show him my empty wallet. His cop brain figures it out quickly.
‘He took your license.’
I nod.
The killer knows who I am.
The killer knows where I live.
What follows is suspicion about the coincidence of Sloan “finding” the body—she finds herself being treated more like a suspect than a fellow police officer. Her family has a complicated history with the law: Her uncle is a convicted drug smuggler, and her father is a treasure hunter with perhaps a less than traditional view of all things legal. Sloan finds herself in a boat without too many people paddling in her direction. Adding to the drama, Sloan has a twelve-year-old daughter to think about, and more and more people are interested in Sloan’s possible connection to the girl in the water, including some who wear night vision goggles to go along with their firearms and agencies with buildings without signs on the door. Eventually Sloan finds that her short list of allies might include the very DEA agent responsible for putting her uncle in jail and cementing her family’s reputation as shady. She is determined to find out what else is in the waters of Florida that has so many three letter agencies and others without governments behind them interested in making it and her disappear.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#cc0000″ class=”” size=””]Mayne, a recent Edgar Award nominee for his 2018 Jessica Blackwood novel, Black Fall, starts off this new series of novels by returning to his home state of Florida. Mayne is no stranger to being underwater himself as the star of the recent Discovery Channel Shark Week series, Andrew Mayne: Ghost Diver. His familiarity with scuba diving comes through in his writing, which balances the feelings of both freedom and crushing airlessness. [/perfectpullquote]
The Girl Beneath The Sea is Andrew Mayne’s seventeenth novel and the first in his new Underwater Investigation Unit series. Mayne, a recent Edgar Award nominee for his 2018 Jessica Blackwood novel, Black Fall, starts off this new series of novels by returning to his home state of Florida. Mayne is no stranger to being underwater himself as the star of the recent Discovery Channel Shark Week series, Andrew Mayne: Ghost Diver. His familiarity with scuba diving comes through in his writing, which balances the feelings of both freedom and crushing airlessness. Sloan McPherson feels more at home at sea, even choosing to live on a houseboat, reflecting her complicated relationship both with the land and the people on it. She holds relationships at arm’s length and chooses a career that puts her at odds with both the people she loves and the people she works for as a police diver. Things makes sense to Sloan when she is underwater; she feels in control even when she is at the mercy of a coming storm.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#cc0000″ class=”” size=””]Andrew Mayne is known for his fast-paced crime thrillers which pit his protagonists against the world. He writes short chapters that move quickly without abandoning character development. Readers will very quickly find themselves on the side of his characters, wanting them to succeed, even as the universe around them seems to have a different idea.[/perfectpullquote]
Andrew Mayne is known for his fast-paced crime thrillers which pit his protagonists against the world. He writes short chapters that move quickly without abandoning character development. Readers will very quickly find themselves on the side of his characters, wanting them to succeed, even as the universe around them seems to have a different idea. Sloan McPherson will sit comfortably in the company of Mayne’s other protagonists, Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood, if for no other reasons than group therapy and post traumatic stress disorder.
Daniel J Collins is a writer from Southern California. He currently studies creative writing at U.C. Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. In addition to writing, he teaches English, Journalism, and Theatre in Corona, California. His work was recently published at City.River.Tree. You can find him online at danieljcollins.com.