This is the first of Tom Corcoran's novels about Key West photographer Alex Rutledge that I've ever read, and I came away both impressed and a little frustrated. I was impressed, most of all, with his sense of place. Corcoran finds so many ways, both big and small, to make the reader really feel ...
Read the E-version with a red pen in hand.Frankly, I enjoyed the story. It would be easy to dis-believe many of the actions of full-time Key West inhabitants, but their actions ring true to real life. Corcoran suffers the same problem that Carl Hiassen suffers; the raw material for characters is ...
Lately, Key West is not quite the laid back place that occasional freelance crime-scene-photographer Alex Rutledge prefers. It's bad enough that the discovery of two dead ex-Navy men one morning?both found swinging on boat lifts twenty miles apart?means grisly work at the indecent hour of 7AM. It...
Alex Rutledge, freelance and part-time Key West crime scene photographer, awakes to his first day off in months. Late August, the off-season, the dog days. Everything's okay until his phone rings. His old navy buddy, Zack Cahill, now a successful Chicago banker, is in town and, at 8:00 a.m., drun...
I downed a beer as I rode home, finished one while I locked my bike to the mango tree, started another while I peed the neighbor’s hedge. I was going to do a righteous job of packing my duffel bag. I would forget sun lotion, underwear, and extra ball caps. Four beers plus a snifter of Merlot sent...
A spooky emptiness lay over the rubble and deserted pavement like pervasive evil, like the waiting for something that might never arrive, but if it did you’d regret it forever. Out of sight, far away, someone rode a two-stroke dirt bike. The staccato engine would fade, become loud, then drop away...
Someone had scratched HELP! in the painted surface of the pay phone. The place smelled of something other than cleanliness. When I fumbled for coins, the pocket jingle prompted the shirtless ace of spades to turn his head. Focusfixed. The leer of a hungry wolf. One drooping eyelid, Pavlovian spit...
We tagged along like freight cars hitched to a long train until we turned into the Boondocks Grille parking lot on Ramrod, taking care to keep our tires vertical through gravel patches. Beth found us a car-width spot next to a pickup that bore the bumper sticker: WOMEN WANT ME, FISH FEAR ME. It m...