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Sentinels, a Florida Mythos

Rich McKee is a retired college professor who lives and writes in Venice, Florida. He is the recipient of the 2010 Distinguished Colleague Award from the Florida College English Association and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. This third novel in a series features another retired college professor, Sean McDuff.

Mary Poppins tells us that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. So, if you’ve got grievances on your mind, and author Rich McKee has plenty, what better way to get your point across than through laugh-out-loud fiction with a sharp edge. Global warming and its concomitant rising sea levels, developers who rape the environment, endangered species and their habitat, politicians in thrall to big business at the expense of their constituents, these Florida problems and more are addressed in this quirky, fast-paced novel.
 
Sean McDuff was introduced to readers in McKee’s first book “The Culprit,” when he was at an all time personal low point in his life. His wife had died suddenly, he’d been diagnosed with a fatal disease, and the south Florida university where he taught was being run like a soulless corporation rather than as an institute of higher learning. Now McDuff is joyfully in love with Jane Kowechobe, a Seminole Indian and a graduate student who shares his passion for Florida’s precarious environment. In fact, her master’s thesis is informing a plan by the new Democratic governor to greatly expand Everglades National Park from Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico, restoring it to its former glory.
 
Jane and Sean live south of Ft. Myers on the fictional Cypress River where they find respite from Jane’s politically charged work – not all members of the legislature are on board with their new governor. Their only neighbors are birds and fish, wolves and bobcats. At least that’s what they think until the day they are visited by a fur enshrouded giant, part man, part beast, who saves their lives from a murderous intruder. Bigfoot? Sasquatch? Jane recalls her grandmother’s tales of an elusive tribe that once survived in the Florida hammock. They were called Palmetto men.
 
Now readers and listeners, you must simply suspend disbelief and roll with McKee as he pits Sean and Jane and a few of their like minded friends against the crooked lawmakers who stand to make billions if evidence of the rare species who roam the land between Naples and the big lake can be buried. Instead of enticing eco-tourists they will just build more golf courses. Fighting that possibility may require some mystical help.
 
If you’ve ever plied the local waters in a kayak, strolled the boardwalk at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, or marveled at the great Calusa mounds on Pine Island, you will find McKee’s passionate umbrage understandable. This tale is part romance, part fantasy, yet steeped in enough facts about Florida’s history to almost make the unbelievable, believable.