Dominic Salt and his three children (teenagers Raff and Fen, and their nine-year-old brother Orly) are the last living people on Shearwater Island. Dominic is the caretaker for a research lab and a seed bank housing emergency reserves of seeds for every plant species on Earth, in case of apocalypse. It’s not an idle threat in the world of Charlotte McConaghy’s novel. The waters, always rough, have lately been rising, and are threatening to swallow the island entirely. The lab has been shuttered and the scientists are all gone, leaving the Salt family to sort the seeds that most need to be preserved in advance of the arrival of a rescue ship a few weeks hence. The situation is made even more precarious once all the communication systems connecting the family to the mainland go down, leaving them completely alone until the ship arrives.
Into this tense atmosphere arrives, miraculously, a stranger. Rowan, a woman recovering from a devastating fire that destroyed her dream home, has sailed for Shearwater Island and great risk. Indeed, her boat was sunk and the kindly captain she paid to take her to the island has drowned. Rowan is badly injured herself, only barely surviving to wash up on shore. There, she is taken in and cared for by the Salts, despite their suspicions about who she is and what she could possibly want. In return, Rowan is suspicious of the Salts and not sure she can believe anything they tell her about what happened to the scientists who departed. There’s one scientist in particular that Rowan is sure didn’t leave the way the Salts are saying he did.
Given the unusual setting and the connection to an issue as relevant and timely as climate change, it’s very disappointing that Wild Dark Shore turns out to be just another dime-a-dozen book club thriller. You can almost see the Apple TV limited series already. McConaghy employs some pretty familiar tricks of the trade for thriller authors. The chapters are short and rotate between the characters’ perspectives. There’s a preposterously precocious child, in this case so annoying I could barely stand to read his chapters. A preternaturally talented and ethereal teenage girl. A gay romance that SPOILER AHEAD ends in tragedy.
Worst of all is the reliance on one big twist. It’s especially egregious in this case because all the characters except one already know the big secret, and the only reason they don’t think about it or discuss with the others in their chapters is because that would give up the ghost. Instead you just get endless iterations of characters saying cryptic things like “she can never learn the truth about what happened.” And so on.
It would take a tremendously exciting reveal to make up for such generic plotting and middling prose, and Wild Dark Shore falls far short of that standard.
