Book Title: ENSNARING THE SIREN – Haven Cove #3 Character Name: Nireed   A features editor at the Haven Cove Daily joins Nireed, a mermaid that lives off the coast of Haven Cove, Maine, for a dockside interview. Reader discretion is advised: This interview contains dark humor and candid realities about vicious merfolk life.   Nireed, can you tell us about where you live? (Interviewee flicks tail) The ocean? Where your pod lives within the ocean. In an underwater city, about a day’s swim from here. Our foreparents carved it into the side of a sea cliff, creating the tunnels and caverns where we live. How often do you encounter humans? For a long time, never. We stick to the deep as much as possible. It’s quieter there. Your boats are noisy. Is that why you’re wearing earplugs? There’s a lot of shipping traffic in the harbor today.  Yes. It hurts to be too close. Do you want to talk about the mermaid study you were a part of at the Haven Cove Marine Research Center? The Haven Cove Daily has covered it extensively in the past, including an exposé on the study’s ethical issues, but we’ve never heard your…

Chapter 1 Science quantified the mystical, boiled it down to logic, data, and biological processes. But there was a kind of magic to new discoveries, and the discovery that murderous sirens lurked in ocean’s deep captivated the world and brought the New England fishing industry where they’d been found to its knees. Myth had become universal truth, and modern fishermen wanted no part of it. The sirens should have scared away Dawn Chaser’s crew, but stubbornness outweighed fear, and they did not flee the Gulf of Maine like most of their offshore competition. Idle chatter and laughter rang out across the decks as the crew prepared the nets, and Captain Killian Quinn listened to them from the pilothouse, their muffled voices drifting to where he stood at the helm. He couldn’t make out the words, but their cheer was unmistakable, and the corners of his mouth lifted. This could have been just another day at sea. Strong morale was good for crew retention, and these days, that’s what kept him in business. But more than that, his crew was like a family to him, more so than his own flesh and blood, and he liked hearing them in high spirits….

Eco-horror meets paranormal romance in CALLED TO THE DEEP, the first book in a Maine-based duology that features a flesh-craving mermaid and her offshore fishing captain beau. Releases September 20, 2022 in paperback and digital formats.   When writing my debut novel CALLED TO THE DEEP, I took more of a biological approach to merfolk rather than a mythical one. Although not completely without supernatural features, many of their physiological traits were inspired by a speculative chat I had with Dr. Sean Todd, a marine biologist and professor at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. It was a fun thought experiment, one I’m grateful he graciously humored, because while I took a lot of artistic liberties, that conversation was invaluable for this book and its upcoming sequel. Fact Sheet: Speculative Merfolk Physiology & Behavior In the Gulf of Maine, merfolk compete with sharks for the apex predator title. They have webbed fingers, sharp teeth and claws for gripping, slashing, and holding onto prey. Possessing both mammalian and bony fish features, they are human presenting above the waist with a fish tail below. Their scales are both as smooth and sharp as a shark’s—when touched against the grain,…