When We Believed in Mermaids

Kit Bianci is an ER doctor in Santa Cruz who has believed for fifteen years that her sister Josie died on a train during a terrorist attack. Then live news coverage of a club fire in Auckland shows a woman stumbling through smoke and debris, and the face is Josie's.

Grief, loss and anger that Kit thought she had buried come back at once. She decides to fly to New Zealand and find the sister who has apparently been living under a false story all this time.

The novel moves between Kit's search in the present and her memories of the past. Those memories include days on the beach with Josie, a lost teenage boy who became part of the family, and a trauma that has shadowed both sisters since childhood.

This is contemporary women's fiction with an emotional, family-centred tone and a mystery at its core. The pace is driven by questions: why Josie vanished, what she has hidden, and what happened long ago that kept the two apart. If they are to reunite, they must dig up buried secrets and face a painful truth, and the reunion may cost them everything they have.