The Mermaid of Penperro - Softcover

Lisa Cach is the award-winning author of more than twenty romantic novels and novellas, ranging across sub-genres from Paranormal, Historical, Contemporary, and Chick Lit, to Young Adult. Her novel “Dating Without Novocaine” was named one of Waldenbooks’ “Best Books of 2002,” and she is a two-time finalist for the prestigious RITA Award from the Romance Writers of America. Ms. Cach was raised in the moss and mud of the Pacific Northwest, where she still suffers through the long grey winters today. She has used travel to inspire her fiction for decades, and in service to her art has hiked the foothills of the Himalaya, picked leeches off her legs in the jungles of Borneo, eaten dinner in the childhood home of Vlad the Impaler in Transylvania, and worn out her feet following an ancient pilgrimage route in the southwest of France. She has sailed the Caribbean as a working crew member of a research schooner, and taught writing aboard the MV Explorer on a voyage up the Amazon. Her professional background includes teaching conversational English in Japan, an M.A. in counseling psychology, and several years working the graveyard shift on a mental health crisis line.

Konstanze Bugg's elderly husband is malodorous, vile, and a sadistic pervert, so she flees in secrecy in the summer of 1804 to the Cornish cottage her great-uncle left her. She can't resist the secluded cove and strips down for a swim, then, while sitting on a rock and singing with the remarkable voice she inherited from her opera singer mother, she's mistaken for a mermaid by Foweather, the king's excise man. She hides in a cave, where she discovers smuggled contraband and Tom Trewella. Tom convinces her that smuggling is essential to the community's survival, and hires her to impersonate a mermaid to distract Foweather. Meanwhile, her odious stepson, Bugg II, becomes a threat once he learns that Konstanze stands to inherit his father's fortune, and things turn passionate between Tom and the mermaid. Cach's beautifully crafted, erotically charged scenes and light humorous touch will please fans of Teresa Medeiros, and the conniving townspeople will remind others of the movie Waking Ned Devine . Diana Tixier Herald
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