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New Florida crime fiction from Jeffery Hess, Danny Lopez

 
Jeffery Hess will speak at 12:15 p.m. Nov. 17 in Davis Hall, Room 130.
Jeffery Hess will speak at 12:15 p.m. Nov. 17 in Davis Hall, Room 130.
Published Nov. 8, 2018

If you still miss Travis McGee, good news: Dexter Vega might be just your kind of guy.

His turf is Sarasota, the longtime home of McGee's creator, John D. MacDonald. And Vega shares some of McGee's sardonic attitude and independence, not to mention his love of Florida's natural landscape and deep suspicion of those bent on exploiting it.

The Last Breath is the second novel featuring Vega by Danny Lopez, a pen name for Phillippe Diederich. Diederich has also published a couple of novels under his own name, including Sofrito, and teaches in the creative writing program at the University of South Florida.

Vega has an all-too-plausible backstory: He's a laid-off journalist, downsized from a fictional Sarasota newspaper, a job that has provided him with sharp investigative skills. He puts them to use in The Last Breath when he's hired by Bob Fleming, a massively wealthy hedge fund manager who has retired to Siesta Key with his smokin' hot trophy wife and an endless supply of vodka.

Fleming tells Vega he's devastated by the recent death of his son, Liam. The sheriff says it was an accidental drowning that happened when the young man's kayak flipped in the Intracoastal Waterway. Liam's body was found washed up against a dock; the kayak is missing. But his father doesn't believe it: Liam was as at home in the water as a dolphin. Fleming wants Vega to find out what really happened.

Vega finds that, despite his father's wealth, Liam was apparently living like a classic Florida beach bum. Not far from his father's gated community is Liam's funky little house, perpetually unlocked. Still there is his stoner roommate, Jaybird, with whom Vega has several surreal interviews. Liam's trail also leads him through most of the beach bars on Siesta (and that's a lot of beach bars), where he runs into another ex-reporter, Tessa Davidson, who's now tending bar but eager to help Vega, both because Liam was her friend and because she misses using her reporter's skills.

When someone else goes missing, it becomes clear Liam's death was no kayak accident. What could be a motive for murder in a place like Siesta Key? As Tessa says, "People wage wars for a bit of land."

• • •

If you're wondering what the title of Tushhog means, author Jeffery Hess provides a definition: "a Southern male who always finishes fights."

That fits Scotland Ross to a T. This is the second book by Hess about Ross, a Navy veteran living in Fort Myers in 1981. Ross has a job in an auto body shop and a newish relationship with a woman he's crazy about, a musician named Kyla. But he also has a dark and violent past, some of it chronicled in Hess' earlier novel Beachhead, in which Ross' drinking and gambling led to the death of someone dear to him.

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A Navy veteran himself, Hess teaches writing workshops for vets and has edited two award-winning anthologies of stories by veterans. He also has a knack for crime fiction populated by very bad people.

As Tushhog opens, Ross is determined to avoid criminal entanglements. But they come looking for him when his friend, a bar owner with some side hustles named Gator Doug, finds out his son, Dougie Jr., has been kidnapped by Cuban gangsters. Running that show is a woman called Cara Quemada, whose ruthless violence is born out of her horrific past.

Ross, whose own son died in infancy, can't turn his back on a friend, especially once he and Gator Doug discover Dougie's gruesome fate. But the Cubans aren't his only worry. Gator Doug goes to his Mafia connections for help — the same people Ross left unhappy in Beachhead. Pretty soon it's a three-way, with some more bad guys home grown in rural Florida entering the fray, and Ross in the middle of all of it, trying to protect the handful of people he knows who might actually be innocent.

"He'd been at the wrong end of a lot of guns lately," Ross thinks at one point, but he doesn't back down. A tushhog always finishes a fight; the question is whether he'll survive it.

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.