<B><I>A drowning, a magician’s curse, and a centuries-old secret.</I></B> <P>When Gavin Stokes visits an estranged family member at Pendurra, a distant estate in Cornwall, the last thing he expects is to enter a world where the consequences of an ancient betrayal are being played out. If he accepts the challenge that this new world presents, he must confront an ancient evil and the crimes of the past that have taken the form of ghosts, like Miss Grey, who has haunted him from earliest childhood, and Marina, a little girl who also lives at Pendurra, and Swanny, Marina’s mother, a mermaid. What Gavin soon discovers is that magic is real . . . and menacingly dangerous.