"The sordid history of Florida's turpentine camps is riveting; the characters less so."
A Muscogee woman and a World War I veteran try to save the soldier's sister and brother-in-law, held against their will in a brutal turpentine camp in 1920s Florida.
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"Wimberley knows his weaponry, swamp terrain and small-town prejudices better than most. If hard-boiled is what you're after, Raines qualifies as the black hero du jour."
A special-ops cadre kicked out of Afghanistan resurfaces in northwestern Florida.
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"Suspense is secondary here, but the story still works."
A Prohibition Era gambler tries to pay off his debts by tracking down money in an unlikely setting—the off-season outpost of a traveling carnival.
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"If Black Mask magazine were still around, that's exactly where you'd expect to find Wimberley (Strawman's Hammock, 2001, etc.), who pumps up his overloaded plot with some supremely grisly set pieces."
"Best of the series so far (Dead Man's Bay, 2000, etc.), flawed only by a Grand Guignol finale tacked on to an ending that's already wound up the tale as neat as can be."
When Barrett Raines, of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, is asked to run for county sheriff, he's not just flattered and intrigued, but on fire for the job. To begin with, no African-American has ever been elected anything in Suwannee County, which might be reason enough to run right there. As sheriff, he'd be top law-enforcement dog, boss of his own clean, efficient department. But the proposition would also be a Faustian bargain with rich, powerful, utterly unscrupulous Linton Loyd, a powerbroker who's never given a single volt of power away. Loyd hates incumbent Lou Sessions, and nothing would please him more than to see Sessions jobless and thoroughly aware of how he got that way. While Barrett is still debating the pluses and minuses of Loyd's offer, a series of grisly murders drastically changes its terms. All three homicides are connected in one way or another to the Loyd family—at first to Gary, the no-account heir apparent, then to Linton Loyd himself. Sheriff Sessions is delighted when the case against his longtime enemy begins to seem airtight—so delighted that honest Barrett Raines, to whom law enforcement is a high calling, finds it more complicated than usual to be honest Barrett Raines.
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"Wimberley turns from mysteries (A Rock and a Hard Place, 1999, etc.) to mainstream fiction with fine results: characters to empathize with, and the kind of solid, no-nonsense storytelling altogether too rare these days."
A moving, deeply felt story about fathers and sons, sin and redemption.
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"It's nice for Barrett, not so nice for the rest of us. There's loose plotting, weak writing, and as for Barrett's sleuthing, one of his suspects says it best: 'Mr. Raines, for a detective you seem a slow man.'"
As his debut (A Rock and a Hard Place, 1999) ended, Agent Barrett Raines, of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, was in a bad way. The fade-in now finds him unimproved: separated from his adored wife Laura Anne, on the outs with his trusted partner Cricket, drinking too much, smoking too much, even blowing off his job, something he never imagined he'd do—and blaming it all on Laura Anne. If only she hadn't decamped to Deacon Beach, stranding him in Tallahassee—taking with her the twins, Barrett's total psychological support system—he'd still be making it. But Deacon Beach, Laura Anne insists, is Afro-friendly, while in Tallahassee diversity just means different shades of tan. Chained to a desk, career in limbo, Barrett's life appears stuck at dismal when an unexpectedly brutal murder and a few stolen millions spell opportunity, and before you know it, Barrett is tooling around remote Dead Man's Bay, surrounded by an endless assortment of thoroughly mendacious suspects who in one way or another make a new man of him. In due time, he catches his murderer, cracks his case, clicks again with Cricket, and wends his way home to a Laura Anne suddenly eager to play Penelope to his Ulysses.
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