The Girl Beneath the Sea by Andrew Mayne

I read all of Mayne’s The Naturalist series and loved every one of them. Theo Cray is an awesome protagonist and his mysteries feel huge. Like the problems could take over the world. And his deductive reasoning creates some really immersive detectiving (made that word up:) and each of the four books in the series winds the tension up higher… ok, so I really liked that series, what about this new one starring the Underwater Investigation Unit.

Sloan McPherson is a police diver and in south Florida she can find a lot of work as she is routinely loaned out to other agencies. Sloan went into policing as a way to maybe make right by her families dalliances. You could call them modern-day pirates… esp her father who is really into salvage jobs.

The story begins when a body is dumped in a canal where Sloan is diving. Yep, while she is under the water, plop, there’s a body… She’s lucky that the killer didn’t hurt her, but when she returns to her car, she finds her ID missing… several agencies zero in on the case as rumors of drugs and money surround the scene. Old enemies reappear and alliances are made as Sloan tries to get out of the way of the killers’ focus.

As a regional thriller/ police procedural, The Girl Beneath the Sea is a decent read. I felt connected to the setting and got a real understanding for who Sloan and her family are. There’s a couple coincidences that grated a bit and I thought some of the ‘bad guys’ were a bit cardboardy, but this would constitute a good Weekend Read for me.