Apparent Wind

“What John Irving or Kurt Vonnegut might produce if they wrote a novel about crime and real estate set in the Florida keys…hilarious and deeply satisfying,” Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel Dennis “Doom” Lewis is a small-time conman who paid a a five-year prison sentence for forging a novel by Eleanor Roosevelt that became an international bestseller. He gets an early release to attend his crooked father’s funeral…and discovers that he’s inherited a sailboat and a Florida town that’s sinking into the sea. But the town is on prime real estate that two warring developers want badly enough to have already killed his father for and will go to outrageous lengths to snatch away from him. Dodging bombs, corrupt cops, and crazed killers, Doom teams up with a Nyquil-chugging history professor, two documentary film-makers named Anne, and a drop-dead-sexy scuba instructor and her Seminole grandmother in an elaborate plot to swindle the swindlers and save himself from fatally living up to his nick-name. “A flamboyant, comic nightmare. The author's best inventions are his characters -- gaudy as comic-strip villains, unpredictable as ancient gods and given to mighty mock-heroic combat of epic consequence. There is fun here, but also real fury in Mr. Murphy’s raging imagination,” The New York Times “Dallas Murphy is right up there with Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. I loved it” Donald Westlake “Masterful. Apparent Wind is much more than an excellent crime novel,” Palm Beach Post “A loopy, cynical, romantic caper novel. Daring and funny and smart,” Miami Herald