Everglades (Doc Ford)

Doc Ford returns to his stilt house on Dinkin's Bay to find an old friend and one-time lover waiting for him. Her real-estate developer husband has disappeared and been pronounced dead, and she's sure there's worse to follow-and she's right. Following the trail, Ford ends up deep in the Everglades, at the gates of a community presided over by a man named Bhagwan Shiva (formerly Jerry Singh). Shiva is big business, but that business has been a little shaky lately, and so he's come up with a scheme to enhance both his cash and his power. Of course, there's the possibility that some people could get hurt and the Everglades itself damaged, but Shiva smells a killing.

And if that should turn out to be literally, as well as figuratively, true . . . well, that's just too damned bad.

Replete with passion and rich, pungent prose and some of the best suspense characters anywhere in fiction, Everglades is the finest work yet from an extraordinary talent.