The Drowned Men

The drowned man lay in the bottom of the shrimp trawler's net that had just been winched up on deck. His wet suit was made of black foam rubber, and at first everyone thought he was an unlucky porpoise, scooped up from the sandy floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Moments later, another dead diver joined him on the deck of the shrimp boat, and Warren Stone found himself in the center of a drug war being fought on the streets of Continental America's Southernmost City.

He had left the C.I.A. under a cloud. Now he cleaned up towns in trouble, an illegal and dangerous business that paid well. Still feeling the pain from his earlier hunting trip to the Adirondacks, where Death pervaded the snowy rolling hillsides and the lives of those he loved, Stone was summoned to Key West-a former frontier town that had become the battleground for competing drug lords. With so much money to be made, everyone was suspect-even the group of Good Samaritans who had hired him to save their city. Dozens would die within hours of Stone's arrival-could he do anything to reverse the tide of violence before being engulfed by it himself?

Here continues the story of Warren Stone, the man who cleaned up the backwoods of New York State in The Hanged Men. Now in the idyllic Florida Keys, once home to Hemingway and the generations of artists, fisherman, and hard drinkers who followed, Stone confronts the Conchs, Cubans, and Colombians to root out the evil consuming the tiny town at the very end of the Overseas Highway.