This discovery made Broome — a sweltering, remote town at the edge of the Indian Ocean — the center of the world’s lucrative mother-of-pearl industry in the late 19th century. The story moves to 1896 and the focus of the story is Eliza’s effort to investigate the disappearance of her father. It was a dreary tale, and the only person with any integrity seemed to be the often nigh-suicidal Eliza.

Both a breathtaking adventure story and a moving testimony to the lengths we go to for the people we love, it swept me away from the first page . Eliza's nerve and determination makes her the perfect protagonist to take the reader on this mystery solving journey, as she faces off against corrupt and unfeeling townsfolk in the quest to find out what's happened to her father. When British pearl-boat captain Charles Brightwell goes missing out at sea, rumours of mutiny and murder swell within the bay’s dens and back alleys. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background. The colonizers enslaved the Aboriginal people, paying them poverty wages, forcing pregnant women to deep dive, some dying in the process.

Ten years later and Charles Brightwell, now the bay’s most prolific pearler, goes missing from his ship while out at sea. This was a wonderful tale with sparkling characters, a huge landscape, a sometimes violent seascape and the usual terrible racial tensions. I also think that the eerie Victorian era ambience could have been upped a notch, but that’s just a personal preference as I love the fascination with spiritualism in those times (I’m referring to one specific moment in this book, so if you’ve read it you know what I mean. However, Eliza does not believe Charlie is dead, and goes to visit the obnoxious and racist Sergeant Archibald Parker at the gaol, he has arrested the Aboriginal Billy Balarri, who could not have had anything to do with her missing father.

Palmer doesn’t listen but, in any case, the young man soon escapes from the jail and melts back into the unforgiving landscape. However, the Starling doesn't come in until late in the day, and her father is not on board, he has gone missing and the assumption is that he went overboard, although rumours abound of murder and mutiny. It is 1886, and a 10 year old Eliza has sailed from England to Bannin Bay in Western Australia with her parents, older brother Thomas, Uncle Willem and Aunt Martha. Here is an unforgiving land where fortune sits patiently at the bottom of the ocean, waiting to be claimed by those brave enough to venture into its depths.

Set in Western Australia during the late 1800s, Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter is Eliza’s story. The book takes place in the 19th century in a brutal coastal town of Australia where pearling is one of the few ways to make a decent living. Those who know him know he has never told a lie in his life—“Never be the one to tell lies, Nico,” his grandfather teaches him.