Three complete novels of mystery and suspense in North Florida in the 1980s.In Hell and High Water, Shrimpboat captain Carla Conway is convinced that her life is pretty much a mess. Her father died and left everything to her drunken stepmother, so Carla has had to drop out of college, break up with her long-time basketball-playing boyfriend, and earn a living catching seafood the for run-down fish warehouse in her north Florida home town of Tate’s Hammock. Then she finds her old nanny hanging from the bell rope of a long-abandoned church. With the help of Aunt Sookie’s 15-year-old great-niece Pixie, her crusty old first mate Comer, and, oddly, her ex-boyfriend’s wife, —she investigates the old woman’s death. What she finds takes her deep into the myths, legends, and history of the Florida swamps—and into the mystery of her own origin.Museum Piece takes place in the Panama City area.Leaving Miami for the sunny shores of Panama City was supposed to be a good thing for the Rankin family. Vicky has just earned her private detective’s license. Her husband Rick has landed a job as manager of a motel, where he can write his westerns in peace. And maybe now their teen-age son Rusty will outgrow the rebellious phase he’s going through involving knives and fire. But things aren’t going to be that simple. Instead, they are drawn into the nefarious doings of Snag, proprietor of a mysterious museum on the edge of town, who hires Vicky to translate an ancient Spanish logbook found in a lost Indian burial mound. Snag hopes that it will tell him where there may be hidden treasure from Panfilo de Narvaez’s early expedition to Florida. But Vicky is not the only one looking for the treasure.In Time Piece, the scene moves to Pensacola.One rain-lashing night, Melanie Truslow’s father–a former French officer in Vietnam–fell off the McClenny Pier near his home and was drowned. Now his large house and its ghosts are hers. As she begins to settle into her new surroundings, she tries to understand the accident of his death and to reconstruct the life of the man who had left her mother before Melanie was born. Her only clues lie within the house’s filthy basement–a room with blacked-out windows, chicken bones and cigarette butts strewn on the floor, and stacks of homemade pornographic videos narrated by a scarred and cynical French journalist.
