The Story of Whiskey Corners

This is the third in the Florida Fables series, all of which are tales set in and around Sarasota, Florida, and based upon true events and crimes, as told by Gawain MacFarland. His career was spent taming a lawless frontier and trying to remain true to his badge in the face of boom times and raucous corruption.

In the first book, The Story of the Sarasota Assassination Society, Gawain is a young man tasked with a dangerous job in the 1890's. He must bring to justice a fugitive who has murdered the Sarasota postmaster and expose the secret "society" responsible for the crime. In the second, The Story of the Sarasota Celery Fields & Other Mysteries, MacFarland, now calling himself Gabe, has risen to be City Marshal of a fast-growing town in the boom years of the 1920's - dealing with bootleggers, the changes brought by the incredibly wealthy Bertha Palmer, the treatment of convict labor in the turpentine camps, and the murder of three-time mayor Harry Higel.

In The Story of Whiskey Corners, set in the beginning of the Great Depression, Gabe MacFarland, who has retired as a lawman only to become a detective for the Ringling Brothers Circus, solves the murder of the "Coquettes on 24^th Street," grapples with the gambling and booze mobs that invaded Florida, the "Red Scares" in Tampa and the tentacles of the Ku Klux Klan. And he must reclaim Clarinda, his wife, who had found that Sarasota has become, quite frankly, "too bourgeois."