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James W. Hall, the nationally best-selling author of Hard Aground and Bones of Coral, plunges deeper into the clear blue waters and wild terrain of southern Florida in an explosive new novel. By turns hard-bitten, raw, romantic, darkly comic, and lyrical, Mean High Tide is at once a taut, intricate thriller and an intensely human story in which parents and children, love and revenge, obsession and madness converge and tragically collide. Mean High Tide brings back Thorn, the dark, brooding hero of Tropical Freeze and Under Cover of Daylight. Now Thorn finds himself shaken out of his still house and into a chaotic world by an event so shattering that no part of his life is left untouched. A loner who ties lures for a subsistence income and fishes the coastal shallows, Thorn resides in harmony with the delicate ecosystem of sea and shore around him, and shares his life with the beautiful former TV careerwoman Darcy Richards. During his two years with Darcy, Thorn has found a contentment his violent past never before allowed him. Then her brutal murder rips it all away. In the skewed moral climate of the Keys, Thorn attempts to salvage his sanity and a raison d'etre by tracking down her killer. But reminiscent of the great film noir Chinatown, Thorn's investigation of a single violent act plunges him into a greater darkness, and in it lurks a mysterious young woman - Sylvie, at once androgynous and earthy, innocent and carnal. Her plea for help soon has Thorn unravelling a skein of wider corruption, hidden crimes, and shocking secrets between husbands and wives, between fathers and daughters. Mean High Tide is James Hall's most astonishing work yet, a novel that lays bare the extraordinarygifts of a master of his craft, a reading experience that you will not soon forget.