The Secret Labyrinth

“…she will know what to do when the time comes, when the moon returns to the stones.”

Twelve year old Halley Armstrong is living on a wild Scottish island, where every 18 years a special full moon appears to dance along the ancient standing stones of Callanish. Halley’s astronomer father is preparing to capture the rare event, but the moon has a mysterious power unknown to the scientists.

When Halley has an encounter with what could be a mermaid, a woman with webbed feet who draws Halley into the sea, then disappears, a perilous adventure begins. It leads to the discovery of secrets that have been hidden for generations, and Halley uncovers clues to her own strange ancestry. On the night the moon is at its fullest, Halley finally sees the truth about what lies beneath her beloved coast, and she has to face her own destiny: does she really belong to the human world?

Pat Donovan and Jackie Stanley met at an on-line creativity session. They arrived at the workshop through a series of events that can only be described as providence, and both broke out of their characteristic reticence to begin a friendship that now seems as if it was always meant to be. Their transcontinental writing relationship began with enthusiastic e-mails and evolved into the suggestion of a co-authored book project. Through many twists and turns, what began as a short tale about a young girl who sees a mermaid developed into a complex and imaginative story, filled with rich, sensory descriptions of the wild coast of the Scottish isles and realistic details about Scottish history, archaeology and geology Ms. Donovan lives in Miami, Florida with her son, husband, a retired racing greyhound and two cats. She dreams of being a mermaid but is afraid of deep water. Ms. Stanley lives with her partner in England and travels to Scotland for wild swimming adventures as often as possible. She has yet to top her swim of the Corryvreckan whirlpool. Ms. Donovan and Ms. Stanley bring out the best in one another and they intend to continue their writing relationship with more creative projects beyond The Secret Labyrinth. Should they ever meet, they plan to have a bluegrass fiddle and banjo jam, helped along by a few fine Scottish malt whiskies!