Attorney Merlyn Adams was a rising star on the Seattle legal scene when she is magically transformed into a mermaid. The first lesson is that now, life is dangerous. Her second lesson is that she is a different kind of mermaid, a throwback in the evolutionary scale-even the Australian mermaids want her dead. And they aren't the only ones, that incident with the US Navy and their nuclear submarine was unfortunate. Alone, disgraced, and unemployed, Merlyn embarks on a worldwide search to learn why the world fears the power that only she has.