Review: The Secret Shore

The Secret Shore by Liz Fenwick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Professor Meredith (Merry) Tremayne was a Cambridge geography professor and map expert until she was drafted to the Admiralty to help with the war effort. When her mother goes missing from their home in Cornwall her enigmatic boss Fleming sends her to Cornwall to look for her, but also to assist two teams of special forces training in the area and to report back to him on why they seem to be a perpetual loggerheads.

Whilst investigating her mother's mysterious disappearance, Merry becomes close to an American called Jake who has voluntarily taken Canadian citizenship in order to fight, leaving behind his former career as a journalist. However, Merry chose her career over love and marriage years ago and she doesn't see herself changing that decision, not matter how attracted she might find herself to the impossibly good-looking man.

Soon Merry realises that the Admiralty are planning an invasion of France, and her map=making skills will be essential to that effort, helping to pinpoint exactly how and when the offensive should begin, what sort of sand is on the beaches, what sort of footwear the soldiers should have, high tides, underwater rock formations etc.

I would have enjoyed this book far more if I hadn't found Merry to be an extremely irritating character. She was both devastatingly beautiful and incredibly talented, with an irritating habit of repeating herself over and over again about how we don't read maps, we read into them - and no, I still have no idea what that means. Also, Merry frequently tells herself and everyone around her that she will never fall in love or get married or have children which is frankly laughable when all she does is moon about Jake.

I feel that the author's detailed descriptions of the Cornish countryside and the many, many, many rowing trips Merry undertook were intended to immerse the reader in her life and embed them in the historical time. Unfortunately it was wasted on me and I felt the plot suffered because of all the extraneous details, I just wanted the prose to hurry up and do something. Also, the great input that Merry had into the invasion of France just seemed to get lost in the wittering about mice and the myriad sub-plots which didn't seem to go anywhere (eg Fleming's love life and Merry's landlady's love life, there's a much bigger one but it's a bit of a spoiler so I won't mention it). Now I get that in real life there are multiple dramas going on which may or may not be relevant to your career or love life but did they really add anything to the story (other than length)?

Overall, I would have preferred the novel to be shorter and tighter and not have all these side issues that went nowhere. I would also have liked to have learned more specifics about exactly what Merry did for all those months in Cornwall, as I didn't get a real feel for her contribution.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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