The Gin Girl - Tapa dura

A sultry Florida adventure complete with drug dealers, a hurricane, a snake woman selling - and occasionally dispensing - venom, this first novel offers plenty of setting and surprises. Set in northern Florida, which anyone familiar with Florida knows is not of Florida, just as Florida is not of the South, we follow a barmaid returning to her island home after hearing her dead father calling to her in a dream, "It's time to come home, Mary." And for her it is time, after several years of wandering the country. But the tranquility of a homecoming and settling down aren't in the cards, even though she lands a waitress job at the bar her childhood sweetheart used to own. Mary immediately becomes obsessed with learning the "facts," about her childhood sweetheart's murder. But facts are slippery, especially when people want to hide them. And when people sorely want to hide facts, searching them out can become dangerous.