I was keen to read this book, as I am very partial to stories about drowned villages, making way for reservoirs, and all things watery and aquatic. So I approached it with eagerness. And was deeply disappointed. If Ms McGurl had wanted to write a romance, then she should have. If she wanted to write a historical novel, then she should have done that. Instead we get a messy mish-mash of the two and she gives neither of them the right amount of attention.

The romance is a bog standard one. Laura finds her best friend and her boyfriend in bed together, and runs to the shelter of her old Grandmother. Coincidentally, Laura is a carer of the elderly, so she can fulfil the role of dutiful granddaughter, free carer and have somewhere to hide and metaphorically lick her wounds. But Granny has a dark secret, yadda yadda yadda. Her father was supposed to have done something very nasty and she has apparently spent her whole life cringing from it.

Granny grew up in a Cumbria village that is about to be flooded to create a reservoir for the people of Manchester. Her father struggled to cope with two small daughters and an old, infirm father while having lost his wife. His solution is drastic, and destroys what is left of his family. Now that could have been a really riveting read if only Ms McGurl had concentrated on that. As it is we get six-of-one-and-half-a-dozen-of-the-other and neither of them very satisfying. Both have more than a whiff of women’s cosy magazine about them. There’s nothing here to shock the reads of Women’s Weekly or the People’s Friend.

Of course, I would have added in a bit of the old supernatural, but that’s just my personal kink.