Hour of the Manatee
My first Tony Lowell Mystery and award winner was Hour of the Manatee (St. Martin's 1994), set on the West Coast of Florida. There, years after I wrote that book, I experienced just such an hour, actually closer to two hours, swimming in the Gulf with some of the last of the manatees this past week, as August turned to September in this, the Year of the Tea Bag, 2010. My sculptor/artist friends Kevin Brady and Susan Super and I were heading for the beach at Ft. DeSoto, on the tip of a cluster of small sandbar and mangrove barrier islands at the mouth of Tampa Bay. It's a county park, and a beauty, often voted America's #1 Beach, with an old fort, a lighthouse, sawgrass dunes and lagoons, pure white sand, mostly clear water (once gin clear), and one helluva lot of mosquitos. They were mini-monsters out of a horror movie or eco-disaster 2012, the worst I had ever seen except for Canada. Skeeters to the left of us, skeeters to the right of us, pouring out of the soggy marshes