In Their Blood by Sharon Potts

(Oceanview Publishing, Hardcover, 368 pp., $25.95)

Reviewed by Susan Jo Parsons

Jeremy Stroeb is a young man without a plan wandering through Europe.  As In Their Blood begins, Jeremy’s parents have just returned from a trip overseas to try to persuade their son to return to the U.S. and enroll in college.  Jeremy, however, wants to go deeper into hiding.  His plans are foiled when his parents are brutally murdered in their lovely South Florida mansion.  Upon his sad return home, he discovers that his uncle has taken over everything—the funeral arrangements, the care of Jeremy’s teenage sister, Elise, and he also has his sights on the family mansion.  Determined to get to the bottom of the murders, and possibly avenge his parents’ death, Jeremy enrolls in Miami Intercontinental University where his father taught, and gets a part-time job at the accounting firm where his mother was a partner.  Along the way he discovers things about his seemingly perfect parents he wishes he had never known.

The chapters are short and the pacing is fast.  I initially was drawn to the book because of South Florida setting.  The book takes you inside luxury houses of Miami Beach, small cottages of Coral Gables, and the offices of Florida Intercontinental University—places I felt as if I had visited before.  It is the rich characters, though, who make this book.  Jeremy’s uncle and his trophy wife keep him on his toes, and Jeremy struggles to help his teenage sister through the difficult time that he himself has trouble dealing with.  A particularly interesting character is Marina, a young Peruvian-French woman who was Jeremy’s father’s assistant at the university.  She is mysterious and earthy.  Potts writes:

She slipped out of bed before he could say anything. Her naked body was white and perfect.  It glowed in the vacillating light.  She pulled a stretched-out ratty tee shirt over her head, combed her fingers through her hair, and walked barefoot across the gritty terrazzo floor…There was a cracked ceramic lamp with an unraveling straw hat for its shade.  Most of the furnishings from Marina’s apartment looked as though she had picked them out of someone’s garbage…Marina was leaning over a pot on the small stove…She smiled up at him.  “Coq-au-vin.”

So whodunnit?  The uncle?  The aunt?  One of Jeremy’s mother’s ambitious accounting partners?  A hostile protest group at the university?  A puzzled Jeremy crosses the city in search of the truth.  In the end, In Their Blood is a coming of age story as much as a revenge story, and a good one.  I look forward to reading more from Sharon Potts.

            Not many outside of Florida know the story of Wall, the retired kingpin found dead in 1955 in his home, throat slashed, beaten to death with a baseball bat, surrounded by bird seed.  (More on the bird seed later.)  Atkins uses this to his advantage.  Wall’s murder comes with built-in drama: organized crime’s changing of the guard; warring factions on both sides of the law; a country, Cuba, on the verge of revolution.  Atkins flavors his tale by sprinkling in real life players, from the big time boys like Santo Trafficante Jr., to the lesser known ones like Johnny Rivera or “Baby” Joe Diez, but the meat of White Shadow comes from its fictitious creations, most notably Ed Dodge, the ornery, cynical, loose-cannon detective who somehow avoids reading like a well-worn cliché.  And the writing is dark, dirty, and raw.

The novel begins with the geriatric Wall, known in his heyday as the “White Shadow,” waxing nostalgic in neighborhood bars.  He seems a harmless old man reliving his glory days for free drinks.  But clearly not all share this view.  His recent fraternizing with local reporters has threatened tight-lipped criminal codes.  One night as the old man makes ready for bed, there is a knock on the door.  And here begins authorial conjecture:

“Then came the knock.

Charlie made his way to the front hall and looked through the peephole.

He smiled and unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door.

‘Hello,’ he said, smiling.  Glad to have company.  ‘Come in.  Come in.’

He shook the man’s hand and the man entered.  The man had dead eyes and said nothing.”

For Atkins, Wall knew his killer.

A former reporter for the Tampa Tribune, Atkins mines his journalistic background, and the book reads very much like a muckraker’s pursuit.  The years he obviously spent researching the case and culling files pay off.  A thorough dissection of the night in question and the subsequent investigation into Tampa’s Mafia unearths an involved, far-reaching plot.  Small details from police reports, like the bird seed, are picked up on and picked apart by Atkins.  Bird seed, used to fill police night sticks, implicates law enforcement in the crime.  But Atkins only goes so far, hinting at and implying strongly who killed Wall, while never outright charging.  An unwillingness to “solve” the crime can often feel unsatisfying in novels like this.  But because White Shadow is so well-crafted and lyrically substantial, that isn’t the case here.  And Atkins doesn’t exactly leave us empty-handed.

Still, the fun is in the ride, and the writing in White Shadow places the reader in every scene.  From romances gone awry, to sideshow subplots, Atkins slathers his work with local color, vividly bringing to life the sweltering tropics of 1950’s Florida and Cuba, that playground of the rich and influential a few hundred miles south, in the last days before a revolution.  White Shadow is a testament to a bygone era, and that return to a forgotten time is the driving force behind the novel.  Atkins writes,

“And that’s where you must begin…the cigar factories are no longer burned-out shells with plywood windows but working brick warehouses.  Ybor City is filled with shoppers in straw hats and two-tone shoes, and the cops walk the Franklin Street beat from Maas Brothers department store down to Skid Row and the drunks and derelicts and burlesque shows…it’s 1955 again.”

If there is one weakness in White Shadow, it’s the emotional disconnect of its narration, a blend of first and third person that gives fictitious reporter L.B. Turner first person honors.  The problem is, it isn’t his story; it is Det. Ed Dodge’s.  The segments where the detective takes the reins are the most compelling and powerful.  Unfortunately, that constitutes only a small portion of the book.  And of all the main characters, Turner is the perhaps the weakest.  He works for a second fiddle paper, does little to hide his incompetence, forever beaten to a scoop by rival reporter and part-time lover, Eleanor Charles.  Honestly, Turner comes across as rather dim, which makes Atkins’s choice of him as mouthpiece a mystery of its own.

Nonetheless, Ace Atkins delivers the goods, making White Shadow a must read for fans of the crime noir genre.

Joe Clifford’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Connecticut Review, Traveling: An Anthology of Award-Winning Poetry, Helix, 3AM, Dos Passos Review, Bathhouse,  Bryant Literary Review, and Big Bridge.  He is a student in the MFA Program at Florida International University.

Burn Zone by James O Born
(Putnam, Hardcover, 320pp., $25.95)
Reviewed by Dave Ash

           In Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway suggested that many of the world’s wrongs could be solved with a three-day hunting season on people.  The first group he said should be eliminated was police officers.

            Florida Department of Law Enforcement James O. Born’s latest thriller is Burn Zone, a snap, crackle and pop high-concept story about a shadowy Panamanian police colonel who wants to bring the Great Satan America to its knees.   Colonel Ortiz has a big axe to grind with America for its humiliating defeat of Panamanian forces under Manuel Noriega.  He wants to avenge the pride of his nation.

            A Trojan horse marijuana shipment is sent to the Port of New Orleans.  American agents working out of Florida are tracking the freighter closely but have their eyes focused on snaring a major drug trafficker on the shore and allow the cargo to slip past normal defenses.  What they don’t know is, right under their noses, a WMD is secreted deep in a cargo container.

            Ortiz plots to link up with a homegrown white supremacist group, The National White Army of Americans, who will set off the device and get the blame.  A paranoid America will be forced to suspend liberties and descend into chaos and isolation.

            It’s a strong premise, a doomsday scenario that resonates with difficult questions from current events and September 11^th.  Real world Columbian and Peruvian terrorists use drug payoffs from traffickers to finance their operations. The Taliban and Al Queda are largely funded by the opium/heroin trade.

As the public focused on terrorism, narcotics had taken a back seat. Few people realized the connection between the two crimes, and how much of a vital link the DEA had been in the intelligence machine.

            The only thing standing in Colonel Ortiz’s way is the thin blue line:  ATF Agent Alex Duarte, DEA Agent Felix Baez, and a female FBI agent with a crooked smile.  They’re a formidable trio but Agent Duarte, the laconic hero and conduit to the story, seems so emotionally detached at times readers may feel like suspects with bench warrants.  One part Clark Kent and one part Dragnet’s Sergeant Friday, Duarte has as much trouble committing to his audiences as he does his forensic scientist girlfriend. “His years at the ATF had not been conducive to discovering much about their [women’s] mysteries.”

            He lives at home with his parents in the garage apartment he shares with an Eddy Haskell brother and seems to have the courting skills of a 40 year old virgin.  It’s a commendable play against the stock-hardboiled loverboy, but readers may sense that the Darwinian “fearsome demeanor” needed for sexual selection is probably necessary for tough undercover work.

            Bad guys Colonel Ortiz and his vicious sidekick, a hairy Wolf Man named Pelly, are malevolent cyclones that would eat Duarte for lunch.  Ortiz flogs his secretary on a picnic table for personal use of the office phone.  Pelly makes himself a sandwich with a knife he just used to cut fingers off a snitch.

            Ortiz and Pelly have the force of will of villains like Cormac McCarthy’s Shugurh (No Country for Old Men) and James Lee Burke’s Legion (Jolie Blon’s Bounce).

            The detached police officer of real life may immunize himself against a thankless world to survive, but one hungers for more narrative intimacy in Burn Zone.  There are few insights, little broadened understanding into the human side of a profession prone to divorce, alcoholism, depression and suicide.

            Duarte survived a military tour in Bosnia as an explosives expert.  A Croation boy was accidentally killed by a bomb he put on a bridge to stop a Serbian tank.  Readers are told he loses sleep over this but there’s no sense of gnashing of teeth.  Perhaps this was shown in earlier novels but Duarte needs to be as marked by his tragedy as Pelly is by his handicap for emotional balance.

     Now with a few years’ experience in not sleeping, he knew when his night was over.  Instead of fighting it, he often used the time to work out, catch up on reports or read one.  Healthier than a bottle of rye no doubt, but “work out” diminishes the haunting annoyance.

            Pell carries the mark of the beast. A rich character full of contradiction, he steals the show whenever on stage.  In one scene he compares humans to rats, eyeing the superstitious sailors on the drug freighter scurrying away from his presence.  In the next he feels empathy for a deformed man with a cleft pallet and drops a huge roll of cash into the beggar’s neck pouch.  He’s a man who sees himself darkly and transforms physically and mentally like Wolf Man at full moon.

     He briefly caught his reflection in the window, and seeing the light reflect his hairy face, turned quickly and moved on. He had been used to the taunts as a child.  Monkey Boy was the one that had stuck.  Even after all these years, he didn’t like to see his face in a mirror.

            Born is a wonderful storyteller.  It’s easy to imagine Burn Zone optioned and made into a Hollywood movie. Scenes zip along through the alternating eye of Duarte, villains, the girlfriend, and the FBI agent.  Chapters often end with delicious old fashion cliffhangers.   But the descriptions are generic and sometimes he tells readers things he’s already shown. The cop-author’s forte may be his Machiavellian ability to crawl beneath the skin of his enemies.

     The colonel was lost in his own little world. After snapping the girl’s neck in the U-Haul the night before, he had felt almost drunk with excitement.  His erection had been so intense that he had found two different prostitutes.  Neither had satisfied him, and he resisted the urge to kill them.  He was not in Panama and couldn’t cover his tracks as well here in New Orleans.

            There’s complication in Burn Zone, a lot to be sorted out, but the dilemma is dodged.  In Dennis Lehane’s crime novel Gone Baby Gone (skip this sentence if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie) the gut stabbing question is:  Would you return a stolen child to her rightful but unfit mother—or leave her with nurturing but unlawful parents?  Agent Duarte fudges the law to find answers but the question screaming to be asked in Burn Zone is:  How far would you go to stop terrorists? Would you trample civil liberties, curtail warrant searches, the right to privacy?  Would you use torture—to stop a nuclear bomb?

            The truth is there’s always been a hunting season on cops.  Three hundred and fifty-eight names of the fallen were added to National Law Enforcement Memorial last month.  Read Burn Zone for its villainy but here’s wishing Born digs deeper into the good guys next time around. 

David Ash is a veteran, ex-cop, writer and bibliophile living in Longwood, Florida.

Hell’s Bay By James W. Hall

(St. Martins Minotaur, Hardcover, 320 pp., $24.95)

Reviewed by Hunter Daughtrey

          “How long can you hold your breath?”  Sasha asks as she prepares to drown Abigail Bates in the Peace River.  The determined attacker wants to be sure the old lady knows why she is about to die and to have her experience the drowning sensation Sasha's husband C.C. felt as he was dying of lung cancer.

Thus starts Sasha's quest to wreak justice on the Bates family-owned business conglomerate.The family amassed a fortune by expanding their cattle ranching into real estate and phosphate mining.  Abigail’s son, Milligan, is wedded to growing the business.  His adopted daughter, Mona, shows a developing environmental awareness and tried to influence her business-driven grandmother to remember how the land used to be.  Late to the family comes Thorn, who has just discovered that he is Abigail’s grandson and heir, with his new-found uncle and cousin, to the family fortune.

Hell’s Bay is my first exposure to James Hall’s novels and to Thorn, his recurring protagonist.  I was looking for a summer suspense “beach” read, and the jacket cover seemed to tell me that it should fill the bill.  I’ve been a fan of Florida suspense writers since Travis McGee and I spent a week together at Nags Head, North Carolina, in the early ‘70s.

As a straight mystery thriller, Hell’s Bay met my expectations.  The twists and turns of the plot are sufficiently well-hidden.  The characters are complex, and I could understand the motives of Sasha, even as she took things to extremes.  The pace of the book kept me turning pages way past midnight. I had to see how it would end.

One aspect of the book left me ambivalent.  I generally appreciate a fair level of crusading for the environment and against the excesses of big business and politics characteristic of many Florida writers.  John D. MacDonald’s warning of the futility of building on barrier islands in Condominium struck a responsive chord with me when I was on the board of directors of a homeowners association.  Hiaasen’s Skink, the uber-environmentalist, is one of my all-time favorite characters.  The environmentalism in Hell’s Bay, however, sometimes lapsed into preaching.  That is not to say it wasn’t effective.  It sent me to Wikipedia.com to fact-check the effects of phosphate mining on humans and the ecology.

            Unquestionably, Hall creates excellent atmospherics, evoking the mangroves of the Everglades and the scrublands of central Florida. Occasional images approach a lyricism unexpected in a suspense novel.

            Mangroves were the forests of my youth.  They were my sequoias and my hemlocks and my sugar maples.  Scrubby vegetation, unlovely, nothing awe-inspiring about them, mangrove forests were frequently thought to be dismal wastelands, mosquito-breeding habitats with no useful purpose.  As with much of the Everglades, a sensitive eye was required.

I plan to come back to Hall.  I enjoy his style of writing.  And I want to find how Thorn got to be the crusty bastard he is.

Hunter Daughtrey, who is a program manager for an environmental sciences contractor, is trying to figure out what to do in his approaching retirement. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, who has provided him with many opportunities to visit Florida.

Below the Surface by Karen Harper

(Mira Books, Paperback, 394 pp., $6.99)

Reviewed by Susan Jo Parsons

           It happens all the time during the South Florida summer.  You look up at the sky and it’s clear.  You go about your business.  Fifteen minutes later, there’s a huge, dark bank of clouds overhead.  Another fifteen minutes pass and a storm rushes in—violent winds, pounding rain, and lightning strikes all around you.  It rages for an hour.  Then it blows away.

            This is the kind of summer storm Briana Devon, the beautiful young heroine of Below the Surface, finds herself in when she surfaces from scuba diving.  If that’s not bad enough, the diving boat manned by her twin sister/roommate/best friend/business partner, Daria Devon, has vanished, so Bree is alone in the west Florida waters, far from shore.

            Although Bree is frantic about her sister—who would never intentionally abandon her—first she must survive.  She swims towards shore, and sharks begin to circle.  She moves ahead slowly, so as not to attract them when—wham—she’s struck by lightning.  She wakes up on the shore being revived by hunky boat carpenter, Cole DeRoca, who looks “like an ad for owning a yacht, not working on one,” with his “chiseled features,” muscles and dark tan.

            Chemistry between Bree and Cole, who had an impromptu date months before the incident, is evident, but the romance is put on hold while Bree searches desperately for her sister.  Cole stands by her side, waiting patiently for the moment when they can fulfill their growing passion.

Bree and Daria own a scuba diving business.  On a job for the Clear the Gulf Commission in the murky Gulf waters off the small community of Turtle Bay, they have   found evidence that plant life has been severely damaged by pollution and boat traffic.  Their study has gained the attention of many in the town, from environmentalists to politicians to casino operators who hope to open on the southwest coast of Florida.  Many locals join the search for Daria.  Bree, whose sight and hearing have been heightened by the lightning strike, leads the way.  Tragically, they find Daria dead, underwater, at the helm.  And it’s murder.

            Soon, the suspects emerge.  There is Manny Salazar, the sisters’ employee, who inherits Daria’s share of the diving business.  Sam Travers, who owns a competitive diving/salvage company, has a beef with Bree, because a few years before she dumped his son who consequently enlisted in the military and died overseas.  Daria’s ex-boyfriend Josh Austin and his wife Nikki are introduced.  Wealthy Dom Verdugo hopes to open a floating casino in Turtle Bay, and an unfavorable report about the condition of the Gulf waters would stand in his way.  Bree and Daria’s older sister, Amelia, is suspiciously remorseful about something.  Amelia’s ambitious prosecuting attorney husband and a few other local politicians also figure among the suspects.

            But there is more shocking news.  Daria was pregnant and was secretly meeting a man at a sleazy backroads bar.  Bree struggles with this new information—had she really known her twin?

            So whodunnit?  You’ll have to read it to find out.

I was a bit unhappy with the perfection of the protagonist.  Would it hurt for Briana to have a small scar?  Fat thighs?  A dorky laugh?  Does she have to look incredibly sexy even when she crawls out of an alligator swamp?  The characters occasionally indulge in long, unnatural speeches and Cole’s dialogue is a little too chatty for the tall, dark, hunky silent type.  Take, for example, this short exchange between Bree and Cole:

“Cole, I don’t know what I would have done without you, even after you got me breathing again and to the hospital.  You’ve been my life preserver in more ways than one, but I know you have a life to go back to.”

“I do need to drive to Miami soon to look over a yacht for a big client I might take on.  Actually, it’s Dom Verdugo’s casino cruise boat.  I was going to turn him down flat, but I think he bears watching and that would be a good way to keep an eye on him.  To tell you the truth, my mother was a gambling addict and ruined her life—and almost my Dad’s and mine—that way.  I’m not sure, but her accidental death may have actually been suicide.  Beyond needing this big commission, I’d like to see Verdugo’s plans and boat stopped somehow.”

Those complaints aside, I enjoyed learning about the diving world and Turtle Bay in Below the Surface.  There is plenty of action and mystery to propel you through the book—it’s a good one to tuck into your beach bag.

Susan Jo Parsons is Publisher of The Florida Book Review

Cruel Poetry by Vicki Hendricks
(Serpent’sTail, Paperback, 312 pp., $14.95)

Reviewed by Lauri Dorrance

            Cruel Poetry, Vicki Hendrick’s fifth novel, further cements Hendrick’s reputation in noir fiction.  The book follows Renata, a beautiful and seemingly free-spirited young woman, whose carefree attitude belies a tormented past that includes torture, bondage and murder.  Renata’s exceptional beauty should lift her above the sleazy encounters she engages in, but feels giving pleasure is her raison d’être, leaving her with little ambition to change her lifestyle.

Among those fascinated by Renata is Richard, a poetry professor with a lovely, socially prominent wife and twin sons.  He stands ready to throw away his secure existence in the hope that Renata will let him rescue her from the sordid life he perceives her living at the sleazy Tropical Moons Hotel in Miami Beach. Hendricks renders his painful moral deterioration as he goes from being a successful man to pleading with Renata to run away with him, having lost his wife, children and career in the meantime.

A repressed young woman named Julie has moved to the Tropical Moons in order to write the novel that will win her father’s respect.  Julie’s fascination for Renata drives her to listen to Renata’s trysts in search of inspiration. Through the course of the book, Julie strips away the strictures she was raised with:  “Jules goes into the next stall.  Her mother always told her never to pass up a chance to go—and never sit on a public toilet seat. . . Jules sits.  After you’ve killed three men there are rules you can give up.” 

            After a basic presentation of the three protagonists, the action begins to roll very quickly. The book is set largely in Miami Beach with a mid-book detour to the Everglades, locations rendered with intimate knowledge of the area by the author, a Florida resident.  Hendricks expertly moves the novel along with a brisk, unadorned style capable of moments of great subtlety and revelation. 

          Jules looked up.  “I had a top like that when I was nineteen.  My father never let me wear it.”

          “Probably this one.  I bought it at a thrift shop.  Perfect fit—small!”  She stretches the straps, pulling the cups all the way down and showing her freckled breasts and nipples.  Jules blinks.  Renata adjusts the top so the edges of her nipples are showing.  “Feel like a beach walk before it gets too hot?” she asks. 

          Jules looks into her eyes, the only place where nothing is showing.  “I’m working.  I shouldn’t.” 

            A deeper and more intimate shading of the characters continues throughout the action, highlighting their ever-increasing rate of change. A vortex of violence sweeps the characters to a stormy finish the morning Hurricane Irene makes landfall.

            Fun, both twisted (in its sexuality) and twisty (the plot), Cruel Poetry is a great book to take to the beach.

Lauri Dorrance, a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, moved to New Orleans in 2004 and remains committed to staying in that city.

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

(Knopf, Hardcover, 320 pp, $25.95)
Reviewed by Hunter Daughtrey

          Carl Hiaasen is at it again.  Nature Girl is his thirteenth novel (counting two written for children).  He also has published two nonfiction collections of his newspaper columns, which are often more unbelievable than his outrageous fiction.  Through his portrayals of his fellow Floridians, Hiaasen has become as much a Florida icon as the Disney mega-enterprise that he skewered in Team Rodent.  I’ve been a long-time fan, finding his depictions of Florida culture to be only slightly more over the top than what I’ve observed in visits south to see friends and family.  My favorite of Hiaasen’s recurring characters is Skink, an honest former Governor, who has retreated to the Everglades to reduce his environmental footprint, living off roadkill.   I always look forward to new releases from Hiaasen and try to catch him on book tours when he passes through my town.

In Nature Girl, as in most of his writing, Hiaasen’s protagonists are sympathetic, flawed survivors of whatever life has thrown at them, and his villains, vile. Once again, in Nature Girl, Hiaasen has taken on some easy targets. The two bad guys are a sleazy boss with a bent for sexual harassment and a loser telemarketer.  His protagonist is Honey Santana, a bipolar, self-proclaimed “queen of lost causes,” and a single mother, whom we meet as she takes on both bad guys in the same day. Typical Hiaasen wit underlies a dinner conversation between Honey and her son Fry, who is wise beyond his 12 years. She describes being jumped by her boss, Mr. Piejack.

Fry shrugged, “So, did he make a move or what?”

“You could say that.”

Mr. Piejack was the owner of a fish market, and had been sniffing after Honey for months.  He was married and had numerous other unsavory qualities.

“You know those little wooden mallets we sell at the register?” Honey said.

Fry nodded. “For cracking stone-crab claws.”

“Right.  That’s what I whacked him with.”

“Where?”

Honey’s description of the encounter with her boss becomes more humorously graphic.  Meanwhile, in Texas, Boyd Shreave, the telemarketer, makes another call.

“Hello, is this Mrs. Santana?” Boyd Shreave asked.

“It’s Ms.”

“So sorry, Ms. Santana, this is Boyd Eisenhower calling—”

The telemarketer, of course, is using an alias.  Having been encouraged to use a president’s name, he chose “Eisenhower” after “Nixon” failed to produce any sales leads. The call continues until Honey, exasperated with yet another dinner ruined by a telemarketer, blows up:

“Because I intend to speak with them [Shreave’s supervisors],” Mrs. Santana said, “You sound like such a nice decent fellow—does your mother know what you do for a living, Mr. Eisenhower? Harassing strangers on the phone?  Trying to talk folks on a fixed income into buying things that they don’t need?  Is this what she raised you to be, your mother?  A professional pest?”

Even though he has been called most names under the sun without responding in kind, he reacts spontaneously to the reference to his mother, who objects to his telemarketing “career.”  He responds to Mrs. Santana with what he “had longed to tell his mother, which is:  ‘Go screw yourself, you dried-up skank.’”

With this, Honey sets off on a crusade to punish Shreave. And so the story unfolds.  The other characters who contribute to the fun and laughs include Perry Skinner, a recovered drug dealer and Honey’s ex-husband; Sammy Tigertail, a half-Seminole, half-white, failed alligator wrestler; Gillian St. Croix, a Florida State coed, who Sammy reluctantly has taken hostage; and Eugenie Fonda, Shreave’s lust interest. The characters’ intertwining plot lines lead all to an island in the Florida Keys, the aptly named Dismal Key.

Overall, I enjoyed Nature Girl. I did not go in with high expectations for lofty philosophical thought, and Nature Girl fit my need for light reading, providing good comic relief for a bunch of depressing non-fiction that I had been wading through lately.  However, I found this Hiaasen novel to be slightly disappointing, and can’t quite put my finger on why.  I think it may have been that the villains were just too pathetic, so that it was tough to generate much hatred for them, as opposed to the easy-to-loathe corrupt politicians, sugar cane industrialists, Hurricane Andrew profiteers, or wildlife habitat destroying theme park developers of other novels.  And I miss Skink.

Hunter Daughtrey, a program manager with an environmental sciences contractor, is trying to figure out what to do in his approaching retirement. He lives in NC with his wife, who has provided him with many opportunities to visit Florida.

Murder at the Bad Girls Bar & Grill  by N.M. Kelby

(Shaye Areheart Books/Random House, Hardcover, 304 pp., $23.00)

Reviewed by Susan Jo Parsons

           If you have ever lived in a Florida condominium or housing community, you probably have met one or two residents with too much time on their hands who stir things up for no good reason.  The fictional southwest Florida Laguna Key retirement development in N.M. Kelby’s Murder at the Bad Girls Bar & Grill is no exception.

            Kelby assembles an unusual assortment of characters.  Danni is a former “slasher film” actress, who has inherited The Bad Girls Bar & Grill from a kindly friend of her father’s.  The striking Danni has run through a few husbands and is love-weary, to say the least.  But she is determined to make a go of the bar and fulfill her promise to her father’s friend to protect the land, which has an intriguing past, from overdevelopment. Bill, a disgruntled resident and CEO of the housing association, is opposed to the bar and instead wishes to install a tiny shopping mall with shoe stores to attract more widows.  Wilson, a former FBI agent, now security guard and Beach Boys fanatic, has the additional responsibility of caring for Sophie, a beautiful blind woman and the daughter of Whit, the money bags behind the development.  Buddy, who is a Barry Manilow style crooner and small time gangster, sings at the bar, with his spoiled Shih Tzu, Mandy.

            So one morning Wilson notices vultures circling a dumpster behind the Bad Girls Bar & Grill and he discovers the body of a homeless man.  It’s murder, and it brings on a whole new assembly of even stranger characters.  Sòlas, a former Scotsman, now Vermont resident, arrives to avenge the death of the homeless man, who is his brother.  Sòlas brings along his two pink buses, which contain a traveling puppet circus, and his two sidekicks, who are “Swedish crones.”  FBI agent Gayle Hennessey starts sniffing around.  And Derek, estranged husband of Sophie, is suddenly on the prowl.

            At times, I felt that Kelby went a bit overboard with the quirkiness.  I could have done without the frequent puppet parades, for example.  And Sòlas has a pair of tiny wings on his back.  Not glued on, mind you, but real wings.  So I tried to make sense of this.  I thought of angels of course, and I suppose Sòlas is slightly angelic when he’s not being vengeful or lustful.  Then I thought of “The Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I tried to make a connection there, but failed.

I also felt that in her effort to make the book quirky, Kelby inserted too many characters so that the reader is left with a superficial look at a whole bunch of people, rather than an in-depth look at a few, so I didn’t find myself rooting for any of them. 

Having said that, it was still engaging because the characters are interesting, if underdeveloped, and there is a real Florida feel to the setting.   In one chapter, two characters thrash through a very realistic thicket of mangroves.  In another chapter, Sophie, in her blindness, gets trapped in a tangle of seaweed, dead stingrays and rotted wood.

The writing is quick and choppy in a pleasant way:

Solas MacKay and his two assistants, otherwise known as the Rose and Puppet Circus, arrive in a cloud of exhaust and hope.  Their ancient buses shudder to a halt, toss pistons like pennies to be left on the sidewalk.

The buses are pink. Well, rose actually.  But they look pink.

When Laguna Key Association CEO and de facto president of the Chamber of Commerce Bill Bryon walks out of the bar and sees the great expanse of pink—a hippie color if there ever was one, he thinks—he calls security.  Wilson’s line is busy.  So he calls the Florida Highway Patrol.

“Pink,” he says with great portent.

There is laughter.  The line goes dead.

           The tension between the various residents is a continuous source of comedy, particularly Bill’s constant efforts to thwart the Bad Girls Bar & Grill’s success.  Murder at the Bad Girls Bar & Grill has a little romance, a little murder, and it’s fun.

Susan Jo Parsons is Publisher of The Florida Book Review.

Wreckers' Key by Christine Kling
(Ballantine Books, Hardcover, 288 pp., $24.95)
Reviewed by Mary Jane Ryals

          At brunch under a lush trellis of bougainvillea in Key West, tug boat captain Seychelle Sullivan finds out from her friend and fellow captain Nestor Frias that wreckers are prowling the waters of South Florida, and causing yachts to run aground.  Seychelle, soft-hearted tomboy that she is, wants to help Nestor, but she feels his career is probably ruined.  He’s run a newly commissioned luxury power yacht onto a coral reef.

            In this juicy suspense novel, her fourth, author Christine Kling takes us on a cruise with her, introducing us to a lot of cool Florida folks and much knowledge about living on and working with boats.  We also meet unscrupulous big-boat owners and dealers, and wrecker business owners.  Kling tosses out surprises that show how what we do can create dangerous echoes for years.

            Seychelle thinks Nestor’s whole accident looks fishy when she discovers the equipment on the new wrecked boat had malfunctioned.  Nestor believes the new yacht’s owner, Ted Berger, wanted the boat wrecked to collect insurance.

            Next, Nestor turns up dead.  When his very pregnant wife Catalina sees the photos of the accidental death of Nestor, she swears it was foul play.

            Seychelle is a salvager of more than just boats, we find. “Honey, everyone who knows you knows that you can’t walk away from someone in trouble,” says Seychelle’s lawyer friend.

            Seychelle takes widowed, pregnant Catalina back to Lauderdale with her, and things heat up, get scarier—boat accidents keep happening,   Seychelle is being followed, and all the wrecker businesses in the area know somebody is up to no good.

            Kling frames the story as Seychelle bumps into an old friend—a former adolescent nerdy boy, now a fine babe of a man. Seychelle plays an ethical tug-o-war with herself about going out with him, even though she’s got a guy back in Lauderdale.

            We see from a woman’s point of view what work is like in the male world of tugboat/wrecker captains.  Seychelle has a humorous take on her fellow wreckers.  At a symposium on piracy, she observes: “The parking lot looked like somebody was holding try-outs for a monster-truck extravaganza.”  One truck “looked like it had overdosed on steroids,” she says.

            Meanwhile, as a woman, admittedly an outsider in this macho world, she describes her own truck: “In that crowd, my poor little Jeep looked like a toy—one that had been left in the sandbox and rusted, too.”

            Kling has many strong suits.  The one most readers will appreciate is how she can pull us into the world of wreckers, yachters and wind surfers.  And of pregnancy, sacrifice, betrayal and personal demons.  All great stuff.

            Wreckers’ Key feels like a mystery and a literary novel that you can get lost in and learn from.

Mary Jane Ryals, fiction editor of Apalachee Review, is author of story collection A Messy Job and won the Yellow Jacket poetry prize for chapbook Music in Arabic.  Her poetry collection Moving Waters is forthcoming in Spring 08.