Secrets in the Water is the first title in a crime fiction series set on Meredith, a small island community reachable from the Welsh mainland only by ferry or private boat.

Most of the residents can trace their connection to the island back several generations. Few people leave Meredith, content with the quiet pulse of life interrupted only by summer visitors and people who buy cottages as second homes. There are underlying tensions however beneath the calm and peaceful face the island likes to show to the world.

Fifty years before the events of the novel take place, one of the islander’s brightest teenagers was found drowned, the result it seemed of suicide. Her niece Kate Galway is not convinced that Emma took her own life. Emma was a beautiful, popular girl just about to begin a hard-earned university place on the mainland. She had everything to live for, so it doesn’t make sense she would kill herself.

On a return visit to the island for her grandmother’s funeral, Kate decides it’s time to discover the truth. With the aid of a neighbour, the sculptor Siobhan Fitzgerald, Kate tries to piece together a picture of Emma’s life, her relationships and her last days.

When the threatening notes and violent incidents begin, it becomes clear to both women that their inquiries are making someone on the island very uncomfortable. Is the killer Emma’s boyfriend David Sutherland, now a renowned artist? Or maybe one of his three sisters did the deed because they saw Emma as nothing more than an opportunist out to get her paws on the Sutherland ancestral home and wealth?

The plot takes a while to get fully underway — there is a fair amount of scene setting and character introduction to get through first. But then the pace picks up with a multitude of lies and secrets uncovered. The unmasking of the murderer came as a revelation to me though more attentive readers might be able to work out the identity of the murderer long before the final chapters.

The plot is handled well with clues and details about the various suspects drip fed into the narrative throughout. Kate Galway didn’t make much of an impression on me, but I did enjoy spending time with her live-wire, impetuous chum Siobhan. Every new man in town comes in for her overtures, even the rookie police officer several years her junior, who politely but firmly gives her the brushoff.

Secrets in the Water has a fictional location inspired by Alice Fiztpatrick’s love of the real Welsh countryside developed during annual visits to her family in Pembrokeshire. I’d have liked to see the setting fleshed out rather more — I felt we got an idea of Meredith island but never really got beneath the skin. Maybe that will become more evident in the next title in the series, A Dark Death, which is due out in June this year.

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