Silence Beneath the Sawgrass
Monroe County's stretch of the Everglades has always been good at keeping secrets, and Deputy Boyd Williams learns exactly how good the night he watches, alone and off duty, a small plane bank low over the sawgrass and drop a man's body into a canal that was never meant to give up what it swallows. When he reports what he saw to Sheriff Roy Merrick and is told, quietly, to let it go, Boyd begins to understand that some things in his own department were settled long before he ever pinned on a badge.
His only ally turns out to be Wade Stroud, a former state wildlife officer forced out of his job over a decade earlier for asking the same kind of questions, who has spent years alone in the backcountry documenting flights across two million acres that nobody in Tallahassee ever wanted to hear about. Wade's logs point to a pattern stretching back further than either man wants to believe, one with a body count neither of them can yet prove.
As Boyd digs deeper, alongside Marisol Vega, whose brother Danny disappeared under the same kind of silence eighteen months earlier, the two uncover a smuggling operation running dead men and cartel cargo through abandoned crop duster strips, funneled through Cayman shell companies and a Miami law office that has kept the arrangement running for a decade. Word eventually reaches Deputies Samuel “Sam” Rourke and Jake Masters, whose involvement turns one deputy's solitary investigation into a case that might actually survive contact with a courtroom, if any of them live long enough to see it there.
With his own daughter suddenly a target and a warning delivered close enough to feel like a promise, Boyd has to decide how far he is willing to go against the man who signs his paycheck, and Marisol has to decide what she is willing to accept as the truth about her brother, even if the swamp only ever gives back exactly as much as it chooses to.
Silence Beneath the Sawgrass is the fourth book in Howard Mark Hines' Blood in the Palms series, a South Florida mystery of corrupted power, a lawman who refuses to look away, and two million acres of wilderness that has kept the county's worst secrets for far longer than anyone in uniform ever wanted to admit.
