A twenty-five-year-old murder, a missing girl, and fatal attraction in a small seaside town... On a sunny Sunday in 1970, in the Devon resort of Pelham Bay, teenager Jennifer Stone discovers the corpse of a woman in the sparkling summer sea. It is an event that is to shape her destiny and that of Mark Piddle, the young reporter called to the scene, for the next twenty-five years; until the intense tragedy is resolved and a long-buried mystery comes to light. The Cruelty of Morning is a tale of dangerous obsessions, small town secrets and a destructive, mesmerising love-affair.