Mangrove Squeeze

Shames continues his series of Key West mysteries. Shames' strengths are his characters and the laid-back, toes-in-the-sand, warm-breeze and cold-beer world of Key West. People go there to escape, to vacation, to retire, and sometimes because crime is easier where no behavior is odd enough to produc......more

For years I've been cursing the heavens and randomly shoving small children to the floor in the local grocery store's cereal aisle, not because I'm a bad man, but because not a single one of Laurence Shames's loosely related Key West books were available on Kindle. To those of us here at FPF, that's......more

Are the Russians who are paying exorbitant rent on Duval Street to run a t-shirt shop making money? Yes, since they are dealing in stolen art...and plutonium. It's another funny ride through Key West with Laurence Shames' wonderfully descriptive writing and quirky characters. Bert the Shirt, an old m......more

Lawrence Shames never writes as if he is concerned with the deep themes that define literary merit...but somehow he touches them in ways that many more pretentious writers never manage. He is a great story-teller whose characters ring real, for all that they occupy the roles normally reserved for cl......more

Beach book. Simple plot, executed well, a nice addition to the South Florida Wacko genre. As it takes place in Key West, it can also be a great February in Michigan book.......more