The Sarnian 1: Dead in the Water
A body on a beach, an impossible alibi and an unstoppable race against time
Oliver Carey could never have guessed how his life would be turned upside down the day he discovered a body in Marble Bay.
Tasked with reporting the news — not becoming a part of it — he finds himself the focus of the police enquiry, and pulled in two directions.
How can he prove that he isn’t the killer, while bagging an exclusive story — one that will keep his editor happy and help him keep his job? For if Carey is fired, he loses his access to the Sarnian archive, and with it the only chance he has of answering the question that brought him back to the island two years before:
What became of his father — and what happened the night he disappeared from his boat in the waters off Guernsey?
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Budzinski, Marie
Fixer for the Consortium, stationed on Guernsey where her cover is employment as a cleaner in one of the hotels in St Peter Port. She lives just above Town and diverts into work each morning in such a way that she can check for marks that suggest a message has been left.
As described in book 1, Dead on the Water,
Marie Budzinski didn’t turn heads. Not often. Not day to day. She was stout and wiry; her compact body passed below the average gaze as she moved about Town unseen. Only her shoes might catch an eye – often trainers, often red – but a moment later she’d be gone again. Just a seasonal worked servicing tourists. Her cover was perfect, so far.
Elsewhere in the same book we learn a little more about her appearance as Renouf sights her at the Guet:
Hurrying back to his car, he passed a short, stout woman, grey hair, late fifties, who looked as if she needed a few hearty meals. Something about her was wrong. She wasn’t expensively dressed, but her clothes were not the poorly matched garb that most walkers threw on for a trek through the woods to the lookout.
Marie is always well turned out and although there is suggestion that she may have a car one time when she visited the Guet (an assumption made by Renouf even though he didn’t actually see a car that she might have driven) she usually gets about the island by means of public transport. The assumption, therefore, is that she has no private transport of her own.
She has spent her adult life smoking, and as a result has a gravelly, cracked voice.