Showing results by author "Wayne Stinnett" in All Categories

Jesse McDermitt has returned to the Florida Keys. But things in the islands are different now. The locals are worried, but nobody can explain why. A sense of foreboding hangs in the humid July air. One of the locals, an investment banker, is waiting tables at the Rusty Anchor Bar and Grill. He seems a shell of the man he used to be—a hollow man whose fortune and wife are gone. Something very sinister is going on—Jesse smells it. He’s usually very good at rooting out the source of a problem, but is stumped this time.

A plane crash in 1976 left a young boy without a father, but 46 years later, when Eddie Rains loses his mother, a letter hidden among her possessions reveals a secret she’d kept to herself all those years. Driven by hope, Eddie sets out to discover the truth about the man he dearly loved yet barely knew. Aided by strangers he meets along the way, his challenging search turns deadly when one thing becomes crystal clear...he’s not the only one looking.

When his wife, Grace, and their new sailboat go missing, Nathan Fitzgerald will do anything and everything to get her back. Nathan, a high school football coach in the Florida Keys, is in way over his head. Turning to strangers when authorities are reluctant to help, he begins a frantic international hunt. Buckle up as Graceless takes you on an exhilarating chase around the Caribbean with twists at every stop. Written in four parts by four best-selling Tropical Authors, the story plunges Nathan into the worlds of each author's characters in a desperate search for Grace.

In this fourth installment of the Jesse McDermitt series, Jesse faces an antagonist unlike any he's faced before, post-traumatic stress. A friend's son, who was dishonorably discharged from the Corps, is suffering from nightmares, brought on by the incident that was the catalyst for his discharge. With Jesse's help he learns to cope with his demons and gets his discharge overturned, so that he may once again serve the country he loves.

Miles from the laid-back lifestyle of No Name Key, and just shy of the raucous nightlife of Miami and South Beach, lies Coconut Grove, a tropical oasis with a distinct Bohemian flair. Lately, a seedy underside has emerged along the Grove's waterfront, preying on adventurous young women. Somewhere amid all the glitz and glamour, hides a thief who stole a fortune in Aztec emeralds. Or did he? Jesse McDermitt must first determine if the victim herself is a thief. The trail of clues leads him to evidence that the thief may be involved in a string of more heinous crimes.

Jesse McDermitt lives in the backcountry and very little happens near him that he's not fully aware of. During a quiet moment, he watches a slow-moving shrimp trawler as it serenely cruises by, barely visible on the horizon at the edge of the three-mile limit. The tranquility of the moment is shattered when the trawler is suddenly demolished in an enormous explosion. What caused the explosion? And why was a woman from Jesse's past on board?

Paradise has a price. For Jesse McDermitt, that price is his moral compass and a bullet. The retired Marine and charter skipper takes on a passenger in Nassau, a young woman who is a breath of fresh air. She introduces him to the laid-back cruising crowd on an idyllic small cay in the Berry Islands. Jesse takes to the relaxing lifestyle like a fish to water. Living each day on its own terms is a new experience for Jesse, but it doesn't last long. Trouble always seems to find him.

A rushed rescue mission doesn't go as planned for retired Marine Jesse McDermitt and the crew of Gaspar's Revenge. The two kidnap victims are rescued, but they'd rather be taken back to the Jamaican drug runners who were hired to kill them than return home to laid-back Beaufort, South Carolina, and give the man who wants them dead the chance to hire someone more competent. Crisscrossing hundreds of miles of open Atlantic Ocean, with a weather eye on a powerful hurricane, Jesse and his crew come up with a plan to lure out the man behind the double murder plot.

It'd been a long time; a lot of things had changed. Since sailing away from Cane Garden Bay, Jesse McDermitt had changed. Waking one morning, the smell of rum still on his breath, Jesse realizes he doesn't much like the change anymore. The mask that he'd freely put on didn't fit right. It was the mask of a drifting, womanizing boat bum, and it concealed his inner turmoil. Peeling off the mask, he soon realizes what a mess he's in.

Jesse McDermitt discovers an environmental nightmare of deception and greed taking place in Central America. A cartel is branching into smuggling things other than drugs. And they’re doing it quite effectively. Having so many moving parts and numerous smuggling routes, can Jesse and the crew of Ambrosia, on a dive vacation in the Bay Islands of Honduras, be able to make a difference? Or will the beautiful reef surrounding the island of Utila be Ambrosia’s grave?

When a group of strangers purchase land on Tortola and Norman Island to set up a commune, the locals simply write them off as an odd sort - until one of their bloated bodies washes up on the shore of a nearby resort island. As luck would have it, Jesse McDermitt is visiting a friend on Norman Island after tracking a terrorist submarine from the Windward Islands. The sub was destroyed by locals on the Dutch island of Saba, so Jesse had nothing much else to do. What he wasn’t looking for was a murderous cult at the center of a drug manufacturing and distribution ring.

Jesse McDermitt is starting a new chapter in his life. As captain of the research vessel Ambrosia, his mission is to study the oceans and seafloor, searching for rich oil deposits. His unstated mission is to locate and eradicate the enemies of society on behalf of Armstrong Research, a secretive organization funded by some of the richest men in the world. When word gets out about a massive drug and human trafficking cartel moving tons of illegal drugs, along with hundreds of slave laborers, out of Venezuela, Jesse is tasked with stopping them at all cost.

Charity Styles had been the catalyst for the demise of many. But in the past that usually meant the end of a human life. As an assassin for the CIA, it came with the territory. But this time she feels responsible for the end of her friend’s relationship. She sets out on a voyage to find one of the partners in the hopes of rectifying the rift she helped create. Along the way, she encounters a deadly foe, bent on becoming rich regardless of how many must suffer or die.

On Grassy Key, things aren’t as idyllic as they seem. The quiet, sleepy community has been awakened. A young woman with strong ties to the community is missing. A local craftsman, the last person to see the girl, is questioned and released. The girl’s friends are interviewed. Nobody knows what happened to Cobie, except that she left for work one day and didn’t arrive. The only lead is the girl’s car, parked where she worked. But it provides no clues, and nobody saw anything. Days go by. Then weeks. The case grows cold.

When a small homemade boat drifts under the Seven Mile Bridge, Jesse McDermitt doesn’t hesitate to jump in and pull the boat ashore on Pigeon Key with an injured boy aboard. The boy provides more questions than answers. He’s believed to be a Cuban refugee, yet when he regains consciousness, he speaks perfect English, but can’t even remember his name.

Unbeknownst to Jesse, an environmentally conscious woman from his past has stumbled onto a drug manufacturing cartel in Virginia while working on a pollution mitigation problem. The cartel responds by sending someone to kill people Jesse cares for. A contract killer stalks the woman all the way to Miami, leaving bodies in his wake. With the help of an old flame in the FBI, Jesse goes to the snow-covered Appalachians to get to the root of the trouble: an unscrupulous prosecutor and dirty sheriff, who are producing LSD on an unbelievable scale.

After months of recharging and rethinking her position in the Armstrong organization, Charity Styles is on the verge of walking away, returning to what could be a more normal life. But what’s a normal life look like for a former covert assassin? Then she gets two assignments, which have nothing to do with each other. The first is to ferry a group of people out to a large mega-yacht. When it turns out that one of those people is the girl she thinks of as a niece and the mega-yacht is captained by an old friend, she sets her sails and is quickly underway.

Paradise isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Few people know this as well as Jesse McDermitt, retired Marine and former government operative. In the aftermath of an intense mission in coastal Mexico, Jesse wants nothing more than to get back to his boat; to just sail away and forget all about the firefight and his warrior past. Jesse is forced to don the warrior’s mask once again. This time to catch a ghoulish killer who is stalking the villages and jungles outside Belize City.

It’s been three months since Jesse McDermitt had any time off to go back home to Florida. When two surprise openings on the leave roster open up, he and his friend Rusty Thurman jump on it, and head back to the Keys for some scuba diving. The husband of a local reporter’s friend has nearly been killed. Not once, but four times in less than a month. The reporter is Jesse’s new girlfriend and they become curious. How does a man survive four attempts on his life?

Things in the Middle Florida Keys aren’t as idyllic as they seem. If one looks closely, there’s a layer of dirt just below the surface. The butt-ugly kind of dirt that’s hard to get off. Things move slowly in the Keys—locals call it island time—but there are some for whom it seems that time is at a standstill; whose clocks revolve only around the tides, fish migrations, and the rising and setting of the sun and moon. Jesse McDermitt remembers the Keys the way he’d first found them as a young man.