From the author of The Secrets of the Little Greek Taverna comes a moving novel filled with friendship, summer, and legends of mermaids.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Erin Palmisano’s The Secrets of Maiden’s Cove, which is out May 13th 2025.
When Grace Cleary’s father passes suddenly, she realizes that the life she has shared with her husband Richard is not the one wanted for herself or her daughter, Bayla. When she inherits Cleary’s Crab Shack, her father’s seafood restaurant and the center of the small Maiden’s Cove community, it gives her the push she needs to leave her controlling husband. She and Bayla leave in the night and return to Maiden’s Cove. The restaurant has suffered from the loss of her father and it is up to her and her family, friends, and the community, to save it from closing.
When Grace’s estranged childhood best friend, Isla, returns to Maiden’s Cove, the old rumors and myths about Isla being a mermaid begin yet again. Grace knows that this is their last summer together and their one chance to make amends.
What started off as a bright summer turns dark as the shadow of Richard looms over Grace and Bayla. He’s not ready to let his family go. He’s not ready to let his family go. But Grace is building a new life and reconnecting with everything she has missed from her childhood.
As the summer unfolds with delicious seafood, hot summer days and nights, unexpected romance, and a little bit of mermaid magic, can the women reconnect with one another enough to find themselves again and heal from the years apart and away from the one place that is truly home?
Prologue
On a planet with 195 countries and a population of eight billion people, there are a lot of places to see and a lot of stories to tell. For many of those billions, the sun rises and sets, routines take place, and the world exists for each person in a pleasantly expected way. But there are also unexpected moments, joys and sorrows, plans embarked upon, mistakes made, and life becomes a story within a story within a story. Such is life and such is our existence that we live our own beautiful story all the time, every moment of every day.
This particular story takes place in a very small, very peculiar little town called Maiden’s Cove, on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. It is a very small town because it has a mere 213 permanent residents, and it is a very peculiar town because it is said that Maiden’s Cove was home to mermaids. Over the years, history became myth, and myth became legend, and they weaved their way into the beating heart of the fishing town that no longer separates myth from legend and instead embraces both. Though to us, it might seem just a little bit like magic.
The moment this story begins, at 2:36 in the morning, there is a light on in a restaurant hovering on stilts in the water, called Cleary’s Crab Shack. If we follow that light inside to the kitchen, we find Della rolling her famous crabcakes and humming a song her mama used to sing, not knowing why she was singing an old hymn about the mermaids of Maiden’s Cove that she hadn’t thought of since she was a small girl.
She turned when the door opened and saw Georgiana, carrying her big book of secret recipes, going into the baking room to make what she called her “wake me cake”—when she woke with an idea for a dessert and, no matter the hour, had to bake it then and there or she wouldn’t sleep again.
Jimbo came through next in an overcoat with a few nets and buckets on his arms, and kissed his wife, Della, before going out to the water where his boat was docked to go hunting in the dark for the night crabs. When, suddenly, it wasn’t dark at all. They looked up to see strange lights flickering across the bay, lights they knew and yet didn’t know, that were part of the town and yet magic.
“Change is coming,” Della said.
“It’s already here, I reckon,” Jimbo said, and they looked out again at the lights.
If we follow their line of sight across the bay there is a small house called Brixton Cottage on the water and inside, Grace Cleary could not sleep. She stared at her clock at 2:36 a.m., the time that it had been stuck on since she arrived back home to Maiden’s Cove two months before.
Grace walked through her screen door and down to the little beach she knew so well as a child, pulling the nightgown over her head and walking into the water, tepid as a cooled bath.
Why is the water always warmer naked? Because then it knows you belong to it. Do I belong to it?
Sure you do. Now you’re with me.
The voices of the past washed over her as she swam deeper to where she could no longer touch, and she trod water for a little while. There was no moon, no light. She went down then, under the water, to where the noise stopped like the light. Pressing her fingers to her lips, Grace sat on the sandy bottom, remembering the touch of soft lips on hers, her lungs filling with air, the dream of breathing underwater. She gently made her way to shore on her back, staring at the black sky without a moon in it, like it used to be when she was a girl, and there was no sea and no sky, no moon and no reflection, only the realm of possibility and creation.
She gasped as she looked down at her left footprint in the sand, glowing with bioluminescence. She moved her right foot, and the sand glowed around it. She knew it could be the algae, or the presence of something else, something long forgotten by some, something that was legend and myth to others.
But not to Grace. To her, it was familiar, it was her family, her best friend. And just like the first time the bioluminescence found her on the sand when she was but twelve years old, Grace knew that she needed one person right now more than anyone else in the world. She looked down at the sand, glowing in the water, and whispered to the bay, “I need you, Isla.”
That light carried that message to where it was destined to be heard, over fifteen hundred miles away in the Caribbean Islands, where Isla was sitting on a beach. Suddenly there were lights around her, though there was no plankton or algae where she was, and she knew they were there just for her.
She knew it was time, time to go home, home to Maiden’s Cove. And so our story begins, a story where sometimes the only way back to yourself is by coming home. The story of the magic of Maiden’s Cove.
Chapter One
Grace woke with the sun, the light making prisms in her eyes as the sun rose over the bay. She unfurled her body from the love seat on her front porch, marveling again at the fact that her childhood dream home was now hers.
It was old—a charming two-story cottage that looked like it was out of a painting, with white siding and windows framed in blue shutters. A large porch wrapped around the house and faced the little beach where Grace now stood. She walked through the screen door and into the kitchen of yellow wooden cabinets with light all around. Her last home in Phoenix had been decorated by Richard, who loved modern style and blacks and grays. Over the past two months since she and Bayla had moved into Brixton Cottage, she’d turned the beautiful space into a home. It was light and airy, filled with rustic old furniture Grace loved to hunt for at the antique shops. Everything about her home was welcoming and warm and just stepping inside made her feel safe and happy.
“Mom, did you sleep outside?” Bayla asked, putting down an old book. Her eyebrows furrowed as she looked to her mother and the door from where she came.
“I went for a late night swim and fell asleep on the porch,” Grace said, winking at Bayla, who looked inordinately pleased by her mother’s carefree antics. Ever since they moved to Maiden’s Cove, Bayla had been searching for magic in everything. Grace couldn’t blame her—she felt the same way every time she looked around her home, or felt the bay breeze that filtered through the always-open windows, smelling like summer. Even the way the water lapped up onto their beach, hinting at a secret beneath the surface—in comparison to their life in Phoenix, it all felt a little bit like magic.
She walked past and tousled Bayla’s head, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Thanks for putting the coffee on, sweetheart.” “No problem,” Bayla answered, delving back into the very large book she’d had her head buried in. “What are you reading?” Grace asked.
The book that Bayla held up looked vaguely familiar. “Where did you get that?” Grace asked, leaning forward to have a closer look.
“In one of the boxes I got from Gloretta’s house. I found it in the basement. It had ‘Grace’s books 2000’ written on the side, so I figured you’d have been about my age and reading it at the time. So, Mom, listen to this and tell me if it sounds familiar.” Bayla began to read slowly.
“ ‘Maiden’s Cove’s founder was Eyefane Grip-hone.’ ” Bayla pulled her eyebrows. “Is that right?” She pointed to the name on the page, Ifan Gryphon.
“It’s Welsh. You pronounce it like Eevan Griffon,” she said, writing it down phonetically. “And the next funny-looking one is said like Kill-drithe Mor-Win-Yon.”
“Weird language,” Bayla said, and continued. “ ‘Ifan Gryphon, a fisherman from Wales, founded the town as Cildraeth Morwynion, but over the years the simple fishermen who populated the town translated it into English, and it has been Maiden’s Cove ever since.
“ ‘Ifan was lured into the Cove after his ship had wrecked in the Atlantic by a beautiful woman of the sea, who rescued him and brought him to a forbidden shore. She was cast out by her people for helping the human, and she became his wife on the land for many years, even producing a daughter, as the town began to build and grow with local fishermen. One night, in the year 1714, on the first of June, green lights sparkled on the bay. The whole town saw the lights but knew not what they meant, but in the morning, Ifan, Isolde, and the small girl, Isla, were gone, and never returned. Frightened, the townspeople feared the merfolk had lured them to the water with the lights, calling for their own to come home.
“ ‘The following year, on the first of June, the new mayor of the town, Ludlow Cleary’—Mom, that’s us, right? Cleary?” she asked excitedly.
Grace nodded warily and opened her mouth to interrupt but Bayla continued reading.
“ ‘Ludlow Cleary began a new tradition, holding the Festival of Lights at the start of each fishing season and the Maiden’s Cove Festival at the end. At the Festival of Lights, every Maiden’s Cove inhabitant would light a candle to bring the fishermen home, and not be tempted by the green lights that lit the water every year at the same time. It was whispered then that the Clearys could call the mermaids. This is the history of Maiden’s Cove and the Festival of Lights.’ ”
“Your grandad liked to call that story hogwash,” Grace said. “That’s a funny word,” Bayla said, laughing. “Hogwash.” She giggled again. “I wish I remembered Grandad, but I was too little the last time we were here.”
Grace sighed, regret and sadness coursing through her. “You were just a toddler then. I wish you would have known him better too, sweetheart.”
“It can’t be all hogwash though,” Bayla said. “The whole town is decorating for the celebration! I can’t wait to see the lights tonight. Do you really think there are mermaids out there, Mom?” Grace laughed. “Well you know what Grandad would say.
There are some beautiful lights called bioluminescence—it’s algae in the sand and it glows. But you’ll see it all summer so you should go to the festival with Sylvie and let me pick you up later. It would be fun!”
“Nope, you promised you’d pick me up after work. Can’t I come work at the restaurant with you? Please!”
Grace hesitated. She loved that Bayla wanted to spend her days in the restaurant she herself grew up in, to be a part of the legacy of the Cleary family she hadn’t even known until a few months before. She marveled at her daughter, at how adaptable she was since they’d moved back to Maiden’s Cove two months before.
Bayla was eight years old and had left her life in Phoenix— her father, school and her friends—without much warning, to cross most of the country to an old and slightly dilapidated but charming cottage in Maiden’s Cove. But instead of being sullen or anxious, she suddenly whistled and got up early, embraced a new fashion sense, and seemed overall truly happy.
And the only explanation Bayla had ever given her was a shrug, as though it were obvious. “We are where we belong,” she had said when they arrived at the cottage, and began to unpack and put everything away like she’d simply been waiting to arrive. Grace pulled Bayla in for a hug. “I love it so much that you want to spend the summer at Cleary’s Crab Shack. But it’s my first summer back in a long time and today is the re-opening of Cleary’s since Grandad passed away. Things are not quite as ready as I hoped they would be, and I need to be prepared for any glitches. Maybe next week you can come in and I’ll show you the ropes, okay?”
The toaster popped and Bayla put two toaster strudels onto separate plates, handing one to Grace. “Is it still a ‘shitshow’ in there?”
“Bayla!” she cried, biting her lip to try to stop laughing. “Where did you hear that?”
“When you were on the phone with Cohen,” she said. Cohen had been Grace’s closest friend in Phoenix and had helped them get the car to drive in the middle of the night back to Maiden’s Cove. Cohen had always loved hearing her stories about Maiden’s Cove and when she called him crying with the news that her beloved restaurant was in the red and she’d have to close if she didn’t get it back on track this summer, he showed up within days of her call to help. For the past few weeks he’d been working tirelessly with her to get the restaurant ready for today.
“Sorry about the bad words,” Grace said, and then sighed. “We still don’t have a head chef, so that’s the biggest problem. Jimbo and Della are holding the kitchen together and Gigi is doing amazing things with the pastry section, but without Dad leading the kitchen team we are still short-staffed. I’ve done some upgrading as well . . .” She stopped when she realized that Bayla was listening intently and not eating her breakfast and Grace swallowed guiltily. The last thing she needed to do was add any extra stress onto her young child. “We’ll get there, hon. I promise. Don’t you stress. You’re still a kid, you know?”
Bayla considered the words closely, her eyes shrewd and her head tilted. Finally, she nodded. “Okay. After all, I am eight and I should really enjoy the first day of summer.”
Grace laughed. “You should indeed. But it’s not actually the first day of summer until June twenty-first. Which is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.”
“In New Zealand, June first is the first day of winter. Did you know that?” Bayla asked. Grace shook her head. “And December first is the first day of summer. Their seasons are the opposite. But they also like the first of the month to be the first of the season, so they ignore the solstice and make up their own dates. Uncle Ben has a friend that lived in New Zealand and he says New Zealanders can really do anything because they are so far away, who’s going to pay attention anyway?”
“You’ve been spending time with Uncle Ben?” Grace asked, surprised but pleased.
“Sometimes Sylvie and I pop into his shop. I think she has a crush on him even though he’s like, way old.”
Grace laughed.
“He tells fun stories and lets me play on the kayaks when it’s not too busy. He said he always wanted to travel but never got around to it. I think I might like to travel when I’m a grown up.”
“I think you might do anything you want as a grown-up,” Grace said, kissing Bayla’s forehead.
“Do you think I can be a mermaid?”
