Pepperfish Keys
A Detective Barrett Raines Mystery
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
There is a Florida that has nothing to do with Disney World. Nothing to do with palm trees or Holiday Inns. Tourists are neither courted nor coddled in this Florida, and you can go a hundred miles and never find a golden arch.
So says author Darryl Wimberley, and it's a Florida he knows. He knows, too, that in towns like Pepperfish Keys, there are those who still can't believe that a black man could rise to a high position in the state police. But Barrett Raines has done it; his father may have been a moneyless fisherman enriching his white employer, but things have changed---a bit.
Sharon Fowler, a local television reporter, isn't concerned with Barrett's race---she wouldn't have cared if he were pink and green. She just wants to use him to get him (and, she hopes, the state's senator as well) into some kind of blazing trouble that will let her write a prize-wining story.
Senator Baxter Stanton, of course, knows how important it is that the town's voters consider him "their man" in the upcoming election. There are activities he would like to stay hidden, and his young daughter, whom he can't harness, is having a fling with a man whom Barrett suspects is dealing with the senator in some kind of illegal business.
But things happen that neither Barrett nor Sharon expected, throwing them into an unlikely alliance. The dead body of the senator's daughter is discovered behind a water heater in the senator's mansion. Can Raines pull the threads together---and find out what they mean?
Set along the northwestern coast of Florida's Big Bend, Pepperfish Keys is an amazing addition to this riveting Florida Gulf noir series.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Special agent Barrett "Bear" Raines has some slippery fish to fry in Wimberly's cleverly constructed fourth procedural (after 2001's Strawman's Hammock), which hinges on the gruesome murder of Beth Ann Stanton, daughter of Florida senator Baxter Stanton. Raines, "a black cop in a white town" that of Deacon Beach, just north of the Pepperfish Keys is still smarting from his recent failure to tie the senator's wealth to dirty money. Eddy DeLeon, Beth Ann's boyfriend and a local criminal, becomes a key suspect after his tryst with Beth Ann on the day of the murder comes to light. When Sharon Fowler, an ambitious local TV reporter, offers to help Bear nail DeLeon, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent agrees despite his misgivings. The twisted killer whose identity is a real shocker challenges Bear to trust his gut instincts as well as standard investigative procedure. Wimberly is a top-notch writer with command of both his plot and the northwestern Florida coastal setting.