Book Review
Review by Marcy Shortuse
It was early October
in southwest Florida.
The air was oppressive,
pungent. It smelled of
dead fi sh. But it was the
black buzzards that I
saw fl ying into a house
under construction
that had put me off my
normal stride.
If you are lining up books for the summer, be
sure to include “Scavenger Tides,” the newest
novel by Boca Grande author Susan Hanafee.
It’s a mystery that takes place in southwest
Florida, and begins in a church with a holy man
fi nding a horrifi c surprise in his garbage can, and
a fl ock of sinister buzzards hovering around a
place they shouldn’t be.
When heroine Leslie Elliott quits her public
relations job to move to a small island in
southwest Florida, her dream of becoming a
mystery writer threatens to become a nightmare.
One strange event leads to another, including
a human body that rolls in with the summer
storms and then disappears, only to reappear
and vanish again.
“It was the red tide and the circling buzzards
that fi lled the skies over the island several years
A GASPARILLA MAGAZINE • July/August • 2021
ago that started me thinking about writing my
fi rst mystery,” Susan explained. “What if there
was a dead body among all those decaying fi sh
on the beach? And had there been murders on
the island?”
The characters are fi ctitious, although there is
a nod to a couple of the author’s real-life friends:
Dianna the hairstylist and Candace the jeweler.
Susan said she also went to an old friend on
the island, who shared stories of the days when
murder and drug running were the norm.
“He had heard that deliveries were made by
small planes landing at the old airstrip just off
island,” she said. “He talked about the woman
who was kidnapped and buried alive on a nearby
island. Needless to say, he is the keeper of much
island lore and legend. Several of those ideas
found their way into the book – embellished,