[Excerpt]

Sleepy Stuart, Florida is the setting for a tale involving prohibition era rumrunners, rumored pirate treasure and a 1715 Spanish treasure galleon buried under thirty feet of beach sand. Uncovered in a 1949 hurricane the galleon was reburied when the backside of the monstrous storm passed through. A hotel waitress and handyman discovered the wreckage of the captain's cabin during the eye of the hurricane, hauled off several chests of gold doubloons and kept their haul secret for almost fifty years until Mack McCray stumbles across them. The handyman is in a nursing home and his family claims that he has dementia because he constantly babbles about buried treasure. The waitress, now in her late eighties, was sent to a nursing home by her daughter to keep her from talking.

Mack's coincidental encounter results in a covert assignment in Biloxi, Mississippi where he meets a retired New Orleans stripper in a local watering hole. The assignment brings back a flood of poignant memories and an encounter with a promiscuous young stripper following in her grandmother's footsteps. Upon his return to Stuart a week later Mack is charged with the murder of a mysterious man found shot to death in the marina boathouse and his best friend Ralph is missing.

Assassins, double identities, retired strippers; mysterious gold Spanish coins and Rat's boathouse encounter with a turkey buzzard named 'Napoleon' intertwine in a spine tingling thriller. Intrigue, mystery, suspense and humor, plus a touch of Florida history, are expertly woven together in the plot. McElroy keeps the reader turning pages without revealing the surprise conclusion until the last paragraph.