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From: The Florida Book
Review [January 2011]
Last week, a friend and I spent the morning on the Florida coast
that writer Glynn Marsh Alam uses in her latest Luanne Fogarty mystery,
Tide Water Talisman. The story sits
somewhere along the north Florida coast. Alam herself says it's where the
Ochlockonee, St. Marks and Apalachicola Rivers meet the salt water of the
Gulf of Mexico.
My friend and I haunted a coastal restaurant which claimed “OPEN” on the
sign, but was shut tight as a mason jar. We passed the River of Life, a five
thousand square foot building that's a blow-up balloon looking church. We
drove past miles of sabal palms mixed with sand oaks and tall pines, and we
paid $2.50 for eggs, grits, toast at a tiny diner. We eavesdropped on
dialogues like “You ever see ole Al?” and “I wasn't raised to leave nothing
on the plate.” We even heard about an ancient Indian dugout that juts up out
of the black mud on a certain local river at very low tides..
It's no wonder Alam has chosen such a place and characters to write from.
Alam loves and thus understands the sacred and the profane of the rough,
spirited people who have lived on this part of the gulf for at least a
century. Alam opens the story and pulls you right in, the way the sabal
palms and experts on grits eating can.
Because of the way she captures place and character, it's also no wonder she
won the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for Popular Fiction with
Moon Water Madness, the seventh
book in this series. In Tide Water
Talisman, narrator Luanne's first words admit, “I hate death in any
form.” She plucks a twangy north Florida start with, “It leaves a hole like
when a trusty old fence post is jerked from the ground."
From here, you're pulled into the mystery. Luanne, linguistics professor and
adjunct scuba diver for the local sheriff's department is boat-riding with
the ancient Cajun salty dog Dorian Pasquin and hefty-hipped “Mama” who owns
the restaurant “Mama's Place.” They're delivering an espresso maker to a new
restaurant owner, but along the way Pasquin discovers that his old buddy
Jimpson has gone missing. Next, two sheriff's boats cruise up and retrieve a
group of men from the nearby forest carrying “a stretcher with something
covered in black.” Luanne says “it didn't take much to realize it was a
body."
The rag tag
refugees” from the Katrina hurricane have decided to rebuild their lives
where they landed, making a brave new start with their businesses at the old
Heavenly Motel and living at a nearby fish camp. This group includes an old
Vietnam vet trying for peace as a junk store owner and a fortune teller who
“accidentally” predicts the death of a fisherman. She and her husband from
“up north” seem to have no past, but stake a claim wherever they can.
Another character, a woman with a heavy-drinking husband, is determined to
start her own restaurant despite him.
Also,
there's a faux new-agey woman with a crystal shop, a fat private eye and a
seducer of women, all of whom seem not to want to reveal their pasts, and
provide plenty of whodunit intrigue as well as laughs. Alam balances tragedy
and comic reality nicely, and she seems to be having great fun with the new
age hooey in this novel without discounting a sense of how mysterious humans
really are and what makes them tick.
Meanwhile, quiet solver of many gulf mysteries Luanne and her boyfriend, the
sheriff's deputy Vernon Drake, have to set up camp at the travel trailer
park by the Heavenly Motel. Around them all the characters broil and tumble
and drink and have secret lovers and former business partners and the stuff
that haunts them.
We're
always driven to find out what really gives here. Yet it's the full rich
characters with their dramas and troubles that win our hearts. Alam does a
wonderful job of placing us inside the lives of the displaced persons from
the Katrina trauma. With a big heart, this writer also gives a nod in her
author's note to the folks who work on the gulf who have seen yet another
anguish in the BP oil spill this summer.
Tide Water Talisman was written beforehand, but Alam has not
forgotten them. We'll see what's next from her on oil spills and murders on
the Forgotten Coast.
Mary Jane Ryals, teaches business communication at Florida State University
and is Poet Laureate of the Big Bend of Florida. Her novel Cookie and
Me and her poetry collection The Moving Waters are published by
Kitsune Books. She's working on a novel set in the north Florida gulf coast. |
