Title: Herring girl
Description: A troubled boy. A psychotherapist specializing in past life regression. An unsolved murder from 100 years ago that threatens to take another life. Twelve-year-old Ben believes he is a girl. When therapist Mary suggests hypnosis, he recalls a past life as herring girl Annie. The session ends abruptly and Mary begins to suspect that Annie might have been murdered. As the therapy continues, the events surrounding Annie's final days start to emerge: her secret affair with young fisherman Sam; the violent jealousy of his rival Tom; the illegitimate pregnancy of her best friend Flo; the emerging homosexuality of her brother Jimmy. Before long Mary and Ben discover that all of these people lived and died over a century earlier in the fishing port where they live. If reincarnation happens in clusters, perhaps Ben's friends and family were involved in the dramas of 1898, and the murderer is still among them. Can they solve the mystery before tragedy strikes again?
Subjects: Fiction, Murder, Fishing villages, Hypnotism, Reincarnation therapy, Fiction, general
Places: Tyneside (England)