Apparent Wind by Dallas Murphy

"Doom" Loomis has just been released from one of those country-club prisons. Ended up there because he wrote a book under the pseudonym of Eleanor Roosevelt that, with the help of a couple partners, became a best seller. This fraud perpetrated on the public landed doom in a low-security prison in upstate New York for a 5-year stay. But because his father is dying in the Florida Keys, he gets early release. When he arrives, he learns that he has inherited a boat (that he doesn't know how to sail) and a real estate settlement that is, unfortunately, slowly sinking into the Atlantic.

Omnium Settlement was the brainchild of a couple speculators in the early 1900s about the time the first railroad was delivering New Yorkers to Florida for vacations. A small town was built and all seemed fine until Doom's father (a career con man) thought he pull a real estate swindle called Perfection Park on two developers who were descendants of the original speculators.

But Loomis Senior drowned. And a couple innocent questions from Doom make him think his father's death wasn't on the up and up. He's going to ask some more questions so he makes his home on the boat, learns how to sail, takes SCUBA lessons (and beds the instructor), and noses around.

And what he finds smells pretty bad. So Doom and his dive instructor work up a plan to get the two nasty developers at each other's throat and enrich himself a bit to stake his future life on the boat.

And not get caught by the police. Something about a paroled felon committing another felony doesn't sit well with the police.

The 1991 gem is a hoot. Like Carl Hiaasen but hate the time lag between his books? Fill your down time with Apparent Wind. Murphy populates the book with a weirdly colorful cast of supporting characters like the local boat captains who've all mastered speaking without moving their lips, his partners in forgery-a NyQuil swilling former professor and a smooth-talking front man, the local sheriff who leaves a stench everywhere he goes, his dive instructor and her Seminole mother, the two Anne's who are making a documentary about Doom's return to respectability and film practically the entire escapade (legal and otherwise); a reality show before there was such a thing. The comings and goings of this odd crew of characters are too numerous, clever, and flat out funny. Not one to LOL when reading, I caught myself doing just that - LOL'ing.

Light, fun, and a perfect summer beach read.

ECD