What would you do if you found treasure on the beach? In Gee Williams debut novel, Salvage, Elly not only finds treasure, she also finds it attached to a body-part.
A short break in a shoreline cottage is an ideal place to struggle with your demons. For Elly and Martin it is the chance to forget their hasty exit from Paradise following classroom scandal. But Elly makes a life-changing find on the tide-line. It is a huge pink diamond ring, finger bones still attached. Scroll back a few months and at Martin's place of work - a Chester hospital - we meet new nurse Hayley. Twenty-five; gorgeous (even by her own admission); she is a player, and totally turned off by the ward surgeon, Richard Congreve. Until, that is, she catches a whiff of something expensive in his Jag and is ensnared by a gift so desirable it may prove fatal. As we begin to question who the ring and its finger really belong to, the cottage collects the secrets of those friends and strangers who have stayed there. Why has Ellly such power over them all? Ranging between Wales, the north of England and Goa, this is a novel about possession, betrayal, violence - and just how much we can afford to lose.
Poet-turned-novelist, Gee Williams, has used all of her immense talent as a writer to conjure up a world at once so familiar yet so alien, it is as though there are some mystical powers at work on the reader. Her characters are so believable, with their stories being told so matter-of-factly, Salvage is imbued with a haunting sense of credibility that can do nothing but satisfy.
With descriptive prose that enrich each page and paragraph, Salvage will, hopefully, be the first of many books to fly from the pen of Gee Williams and so enhance the reputation she already has as a fine writer.
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