The gloom grew as the road gained height, winding up from Plymouth towards the high moorland. Houses became fewer with each bend I drove around, until only fields and woodlands lay either side, and what had been a sunny afternoon in the coastal town was now overcast, the air thick with mist.

“I guess you’re right, Phil,” I said, looking across Donegal Bay towards the River Erne’s windswept estuary as the Mammoth, the world’s largest floating crane, groaned under the weight of its as-yet-unseen undersea charge.

Shepherd is a platform where authors may share a 'shelf' of five favourite books with a theme related to a particular book they have written.

There are Shepherd lists for both Angel's Blade and The Face Stone.

“You don’t look like an unknown animal tracker...”

"...it’s a long-time passion of mine. I read the first edition of that book of Heuvelmans’ while I was still up at Cambridge, and it really did it for me.”

“You studied that cryptozoology stuff then?”

“You are Jack Sangster, owner of this green E-Type?”

“You know of Piri Reis?”

“You had a book on him in your room.”

“I did, didn’t I,” she laughed. “Well, his maps of the New World were based on much older ones I’m sure..."

“Speaking the old language, she was,” he said to me, cheeks flushed as he rushed off down the corridor. “The old language I tell you, Mr Sangster, thought it was forgotten by youngsters till I heard her talking.”

Angel had done a stylised pen and ink drawing of a fish, but her fish looked somehow wrong. I stared at its downturned mouth, exaggerated spiky fins, and curved form for a moment before realising it had multiple tails, which when I counted them up (three times as they were tangled together and hard to tally), totalled nine.

‘Bad crossing over the River Fal at high tide, April 1970’

...was written underneath, followed by the initials ‘AB’.

And the view was spectacular, the hotel looking out over the tidal tree-lined T-shaped confluence of the Truro and Tresillian Rivers, which formed a larger channel that curved out of sight to the south---

--- I had watched this scene change with the passing of winter and the greening of spring, and rain, wind or shine, there was always something different to see.