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Deadly Sweet
When Corey Darrow's body was dragged from the canal where she had drowned in her truck, her hand was still clutching a cocked .357 Magnum. She had come to Eddie for help, a black Irish beauty who was being harassed for raising the ecological flag in the rich dark ooze of Okee County—land of sugarcane, migrant worker, neo-colonialists, and rattle snakes as big a your thigh. A botanist had disappeared after making enquiries at Corey's water management office. Corey asked too many questions of the wrong people, the menacing phone calls began, and she suspected she was being followed. Running on regret for not sensing a serious threat, Eddie Priest drove to Okee City to check out how she had died.He was downing Wild Turkey in the Cane Cutter Bar when Corey's double walked in—Sawnie Darrow, a senior aid to the governor. She had the same million dollar voice as her sister, and a dangerous taste for the truth. She didn't care about Eddie's wife, searching for her center in California, or his vaunted football fame. She wanted him to find out if her sister was murdered. This time Eddie couldn't say no.His first stop was Harry W. Feather, whose big white Caddy, Buck knife, and slimy silk shirts propped up his fantasy of tribal warrior prince. Fascinated by decay, sex, and clinical horrors, Harry was an elemental predator who saw meddling humans as a species of prey. Tow-truck operator Boner Harkness thought getting shot by a corpse's gun was bad enough. He didn't know what bad was. Lofton Coltis, a Harvard man with deep roots in his forebears' soil savored the hot Gulf winds that blew ten miles over his sugar cane land before reaching his house. Coltis was a two hundred octane Anglo supremacist, and in Okee County his will was law. Clinton Reynolds, Corey's boss, had warned her to shut up—but nothing could silence his dying ravings, caused by an untraced toxin. Moira Big Breath, a member of the Miccosukee Tribe and a Barnard graduate, was nursing a Florida panther back to health with road kill and special loving care. A fearless political activist, Moira wanted the White Man off her ancestors' lands.With the help of insurance investigator Raymer Harney, Eddie was heading into a tangle of vested interests, furtive passions, greed, and unleashed mania that could trap the most ingenious hunter. The truth about Corey's death—and the dirty secrets behind it—might be rotting under a rock too deadly to kick over.Of Sterling Watson's Deadly Sweet, Carl Hiaasen said, "It takes a fine writer to get a grip on such a mad place, and Watson does it. His best characters are mangy, menacing, and too true to life. I see them daily on Highway One, and keep a safe distance." Welcome to Sterling Watson's tour de force.
- GenresFiction
380 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1994
16 people want to read
About the author
Sterling Watson
10 books29 followersSTERLING WATSON is the author of seven novels, including Deadly Sweet, Sweet Dream Baby, Fighting in the Shade, and Suitcase City. Watson’s short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, the Georgia Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and the Southern Review. He was director of the creative writing program at Eckerd College for twenty years and now teaches in the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College in Boston. Of his sixth novel, Suitcase City, Tom Franklin said, “If this taut literary crime novel doesn’t center Sterling Watson on the map, we should change maps.” Watson lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Committee is his latest novel.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 21, 2021
Eddie Priest is an ex-lawyer selling boats in Florida. He has a nice life, thank you very much. And then he meets Corey Darrow who tells him she's in fear for her life and needs his help. He finally decides to help a little about the same time she turns up dead and her nearly look-alike sister, who is also the mistress of the Governor of Florida turns up. This story takes amazing twists and turns. It is really good. Why are so many good mysteries set in Florida? Reading them makes me uncomfortably sweaty.
April 1, 2020
I really enjoyed this mystery. All Sterling Watson's books are worth reading.
July 19, 2012
Eddie Priest was a lawyer. Now he's a hard drinking boat salesman and restorer, the latter chiefly of his own boat purchased sight unseen, with all the structural issues that suggests--hence its name.
Corey Darrow, auburn tressed green-eyed beauty, lightly leaps onto the Sight Unseen one day, sent to him for help by Raymer Harmey, an acquaintance of Eddie's who stuck with law enforcement. Corey's worried about a botanist who went missing after he inquired at her office with the Water Management Department, a file that went missing from her computer shortly afterwards, sexual harassment following close on the heels of her expressing her concerns...not to mention the fact that she herself is being followed/stalked by a "darkly tanned" man in sunglasses who drives an outdated Caddy. Eddie demurs, insofar as a gun-toting tough guy of his type can do such a delicate gesture, despite the afternoon he spent skinnydipping (and other adult activities) on a picnic with Corey.
He's sucked into the investigation willy-nilly when Corey Darrow is found drowned with a .357 Magnum locked in her fist, after her baby-blue Ford truck ran off the road into a swampy ditch. Or rather, when Corey's twin sister, Sawney, comes sauntering into Eddie's favorite gin mill dive to beg him to avenge her sister's death.
Harry W. Feather, part-Indian, is working for Lofton Coltis, proudly pure Anglo and the local land baron--it is on Coltis's land that the botanist found a plant, thought only to grow in the Amazonian rain forest along with all the other phenomenally useful botanic specimens. Harry starts getting nervous when the police come sniffing around after he messes with Corey just a little too hard the night she died, and rushes off to the one lone body shop in town capable of repainting his Caddy where he bumped into Corey's truck. The body shop owner, who is also the town's only tow truck driver, puts two and two together when he realizes that the paint smudge on Harry's car matches the paint on Corey's car, and vice versa.
...and yes, if you've started guessing about the connection between Darrow and Feather and Coltis, with a few side bets on who lives and who dies at whose hand, you're pretty much right.
Gators and swamps and long-legged beauties; big cars, handguns and gas guzzlers. Thugs and politicians1. Native Americans. Florida panthers. Steamy velvety dark nights, manly swaggering and fast car chases. This is dudelit if I ever saw it1.; it's an action-packed thriller with all the atmospheric swampiness one might expect from a book set in Fla'da; reading it, I felt that I should have been sitting in a tent of mosquito netting imbued with full-strength DEET.
What to read next? Oddly, I first thought of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, though that's largely due to the Florida backdrop, the protagonist's ownership of a boat, and...well, the general dudelit air of the series, not to mention the protagonist who lives on a boat and who has an eye for the ladies.
1stop laughing. There is a difference. No, really.
2to the best of my knowledge, that's not a real literary term, but I think it should be. Surely there's a category of Manly Testosterone-Laden books to serve as a counterpoint to all the chicklit in which everyone has feelings but never does anything
Corey Darrow, auburn tressed green-eyed beauty, lightly leaps onto the Sight Unseen one day, sent to him for help by Raymer Harmey, an acquaintance of Eddie's who stuck with law enforcement. Corey's worried about a botanist who went missing after he inquired at her office with the Water Management Department, a file that went missing from her computer shortly afterwards, sexual harassment following close on the heels of her expressing her concerns...not to mention the fact that she herself is being followed/stalked by a "darkly tanned" man in sunglasses who drives an outdated Caddy. Eddie demurs, insofar as a gun-toting tough guy of his type can do such a delicate gesture, despite the afternoon he spent skinnydipping (and other adult activities) on a picnic with Corey.
He's sucked into the investigation willy-nilly when Corey Darrow is found drowned with a .357 Magnum locked in her fist, after her baby-blue Ford truck ran off the road into a swampy ditch. Or rather, when Corey's twin sister, Sawney, comes sauntering into Eddie's favorite gin mill dive to beg him to avenge her sister's death.
Harry W. Feather, part-Indian, is working for Lofton Coltis, proudly pure Anglo and the local land baron--it is on Coltis's land that the botanist found a plant, thought only to grow in the Amazonian rain forest along with all the other phenomenally useful botanic specimens. Harry starts getting nervous when the police come sniffing around after he messes with Corey just a little too hard the night she died, and rushes off to the one lone body shop in town capable of repainting his Caddy where he bumped into Corey's truck. The body shop owner, who is also the town's only tow truck driver, puts two and two together when he realizes that the paint smudge on Harry's car matches the paint on Corey's car, and vice versa.
...and yes, if you've started guessing about the connection between Darrow and Feather and Coltis, with a few side bets on who lives and who dies at whose hand, you're pretty much right.
Gators and swamps and long-legged beauties; big cars, handguns and gas guzzlers. Thugs and politicians1. Native Americans. Florida panthers. Steamy velvety dark nights, manly swaggering and fast car chases. This is dudelit if I ever saw it1.; it's an action-packed thriller with all the atmospheric swampiness one might expect from a book set in Fla'da; reading it, I felt that I should have been sitting in a tent of mosquito netting imbued with full-strength DEET.
What to read next? Oddly, I first thought of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, though that's largely due to the Florida backdrop, the protagonist's ownership of a boat, and...well, the general dudelit air of the series, not to mention the protagonist who lives on a boat and who has an eye for the ladies.
1stop laughing. There is a difference. No, really.
2to the best of my knowledge, that's not a real literary term, but I think it should be. Surely there's a category of Manly Testosterone-Laden books to serve as a counterpoint to all the chicklit in which everyone has feelings but never does anything
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews