The title, The Drowned Phoenician Sailor, is a reference to the tarot in T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, and is an ambiguous symbol of rebirth and/or doom.

The heroine, Fynn, is troubled by apparitions of his long-dead twin sister Abby. Is Abby a spirit or a hallucination?

Fynn is having psychotherapy with Paul in an attempt to stop the visitations. Arriving for a session, she discovers him lifeless in his chair. Soon after his funeral, he also begins to visit. She encounters Paul’s dysfunctional family, from whom she manages to hide the fact that she was Paul’s client. A twist of fate involving Fynn’s ethereally-minded, tarot card-reading mother finally brings Fynn true love.

This is a pacy, quirky page-turner that reads like a thriller while nourishing the reader’s soul with illuminating observations about relationships. The author, Lesley Hayes, an Oxford-based psychotherapist, was a prolific novelist prior to starting psychotherapy training in 1990, and returned to writing five years ago.

Grant Nightingale