Hour of the Manatee — E.C. Ayres

She calls him a "hippie deadbeat."
He thinks she's a "hard-nosed yuppie."
But they need each other to catch a killer from the past.

Tony Lowell is a shaggy 1960s dropout, ex-hotshot press photographer and occasional P.I. In a shack on Florida's sleepy mangrove-fringed Gulf Coast he plays Beatles, reads Zen, and restores an old sailboat.

Detective Lena Bedrosian is ultra-1990s--a brilliant by-the-book cop who works hard, lives clean, wears a Halston suit, and cuts right through chauvinism with her razor-sharp tongue.

Lowell and Bedrosian detest each other, until the murder of Lowell's latest client--an elderly housekeeper about to blow the lid off a 1966 drowning--pitches them both into the blueblood enclave of Palm Coast Harbor. Together, they'll dodge the FBI, hunt out witnesses who turn up as worm food, and get sucked into a quarter-century of power-house family secrets, a Supreme Court scandal, and a killer political hurricane that's getting ready to blow them away.