FINNED, The Merworld Water Wars, Book One by Sutton Shields

Take a fish-phobic girl, divide her by one hot merman, add a splash of his crazy ex-merbitch, and you get one stinky school year.

Marina Valentine is a rule-stretcher in an uptight Texas seaside town. She’s hormonally challenged, curious to a fault, hates fish, and has a dating resume that makes the queen look like a slut. It’s not that guys don’t ask her out. They do try. She just has an unfortunate reaction to dating—uncontrollable gags. It’s not exactly a turn on.

One by one, her oddball friends start disappearing—much to the joy of the snobby high school royals—and Marina fears she is a walking bull’s eye. Inquiries into their disappearances lead to startling discoveries and an increasingly inconvenient attraction to one of the royals who holds the key to solving the mystery…in his fin. Soon, she finds herself in the middle of a looming underwater war that’s really going to complicate her dating life.

As time closes in—and the Merpeople officially come out of the ocean—Marina must choose between the lives of her friends, the future of an underwater utopia, and the life of her first love. One problem: how does a love-shy, fish-phobic, non-mergirl go about doing that…especially when her enemy may be the one person she trusted with her heart?