"Even before John D. MacDonald first anchored Travis McGee's houseboat, the Busted Flush, at Fort Lau-derdale's Bahia Mar Marina, Florida had developed a rich legacy of fictional detectives. Since McGee, the state has become the home of perhaps the greatest number and variety of mystery writers in America.

From Elmore Leonard's professional hoods to Carl Hiaasen's amateur grotesques, Florida's mystery writers have created a criminal universe that centers on Miami but stretches from the Key West of James Hall and Laurence Shames through the Palm Beach of Lawrence Sanders and the Orlando of John Lutz to the panhandle of Geoffrey Norman. This is a world of sophisticated Latina journalists like Edna Buchanan's Britt Montero and retiring ichthyologists like Randy Wayne White's Doc Ford, of Armani-clad socialites like Ed McBain's Matthew Hope and leisure-suited cops like Charles Willeford's Hope Moseley.

For the first time, a group of literary critics examines how the center of crime shifted from the City of Angels to the home of Miami Vice and the Magic Kingdom and why the country's southernmost state has developed such a concentration of talented mystery writers. In addition to essays on the origins of the detective novel in Florida and its contemporary masters, the book includes a chapter on Florida film noir from Key Largo to Body Heat and the first comprehensive bibliography of mysteries set in the state."--Amazon website