Skinny Dip

At eleven o'clock on an April night, Joey Perrone is thrown overboard from the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess by her husband, Chaz Perrone, on the evening of their second wedding anniversary. Chaz drops a key on the deck as a ruse, grabs Joey's ankles, and flips her backward over the rail into the Atlantic. A former co-captain of her college swim team, Joey survives the fall and begins swimming toward the Florida coast, exhausted from the wine Chaz plied her with at dinner. She cannot fathom why he would kill her: He stands to inherit nothing from her roughly $13 million estate, which is locked in an irrevocable trust benefiting wildlife charities. Back in the stateroom, Chaz stages the scene to suggest Joey wandered out at 3:30 a.m., hours after the actual time, and places a copy of Madame Bovary on her nightstand to hint at suicidal tendencies.

Joey's parents, Hank and Lana Wheeler, casino owners in Elko, Nevada, died in a plane crash when she was four, leaving her and her brother, Corbett Wheeler, a substantial inheritance. Her first husband, a stockbroker named Benjamin Middenbock, was killed when a sky diver whose parachute failed landed on him. Joey met Chaz at Walt Disney World, where she was impressed by his good looks and his claim to be a biologist saving the Everglades. Lonely after being dumped by three men in succession, she married him after a whirlwind courtship, only to realize by their second year that he was impersonal and chronically unfaithful.

Mick Stranahan, a retired state attorney's investigator living alone on a small island in Biscayne Bay, finds Joey clinging to a bale of Jamaican marijuana half a mile off Elliott Key. He brings her to his island, nurses her back to health, and listens as she describes what happened. Joey asks him not to call the police, wanting time to understand why Chaz tried to kill her. Stranahan, who has killed several people in the line of duty and been married six times, is wary but agrees.

After the Sun Duchess docks, Chaz is questioned by Broward County Sheriff's detective Karl Rolvaag. Rolvaag is skeptical from the start, noting inconsistencies and Chaz's rehearsed-sounding grief. The Coast Guard calls off its search after roughly 36 hours. Rolvaag later examines a confiscated marijuana bale bearing finger-shaped grooves, extracts broken fingernail tips, and confirms through DNA that they belong to Joey. The bale was found far south of where Chaz claimed Joey went overboard, proving he lied about the timeline.

Joey decides to remain "dead" and, with Stranahan's reluctant cooperation, launches a campaign of psychological torment. Using a spare key and the unchanged alarm code, she sneaks into the house, hanging her black dress in the closet, leaving lipstick in the vanity, and placing a photograph with her face scissored out under Chaz's pillow. She calls Corbett in New Zealand, and he supports the scheme, calling Rolvaag to voice suspicion about Chaz.

The novel reveals Chaz's corrupt arrangement with Red Hammernut, a powerful agribusiness tycoon whose vegetable farms are among the worst phosphorus polluters in the Everglades. Chaz, a mediocre student recruited by Hammernut, was installed as a state biologist monitoring runoff from Hammernut's fields. He records phosphorus levels of nine parts per billion when actual levels exceed 300, nearly 30 times the legal limit, saving Hammernut millions in pollution controls. Chaz killed Joey because he believed she had discovered the scheme: Two months before the cruise, she came home unexpectedly and found him forging water charts, triggering a violent outburst.

Hammernut assigns Tool (Earl Edward O'Toole), a massive former farm crew boss with a bullet lodged in his buttocks, to serve as Chaz's bodyguard. Tool steals fentanyl pain patches from nursing home patients to manage chronic pain. During his visits, he develops an unexpected bond with Maureen, an 81-year-old who has cancer. She scolds him for using racial slurs, urges him to have the bullet removed, and tells him it is never too late to change, gradually reshaping his outlook.

Stranahan escalates the plan by calling Chaz with celebrity voice impressions, claiming to have witnessed the murder, and demanding $500,000. He also visits Chaz's girlfriend, Ricca Spillman, at her hair salon, posing as a cruise ship security officer and telling her Chaz pushed his wife overboard. To give Rolvaag the murder motive he lacks, Stranahan has his brother-in-law, Kipper Garth, forge a new will leaving Joey's estate to Chaz. The forged document, sent anonymously to Rolvaag, provides a $13 million motive while tormenting Chaz, who is tantalized by the possibility it might be real.

Chaz's mental state deteriorates. He develops sexual dysfunction tied to memories of Joey, and an encounter with Medea, a New Age reflexologist he occasionally sleeps with, fails when he detects Joey's perfume in the house, unaware that Joey is hiding under the bed. When Ricca confronts him about the murder, Chaz drives her to the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge and shoots her. Ricca survives by diving into the swamp and is rescued by a one-eyed Vietnam veteran living as a hermit in the Everglades, known only as "Captain."

Corbett flies from New Zealand and arranges a memorial service at a Boca Raton church. Chaz delivers a eulogy subtly implying Joey was suicidal but faints when Ricca arrives on crutches during his speech. Outside, Stranahan slips blackmail instructions to Chaz, while Joey's best friend, Rose Jewell, invites Chaz to dinner as part of the plan. At Rose's house, she drugs Chaz's wine with diazepam, a sedative. After Rose leaves, Joey lies down beside her sedated husband in the dark. Under the influence, Chaz admits he married her because she was "hot" and tried to kill her because he thought she had discovered the water fraud.

For the money drop, Stranahan, Joey, and Corbett film a staged re-creation of the murder and send copies to both Chaz and Hammernut. Hammernut provides the $500,000 and secretly orders Tool to kill Chaz, but Tool, transformed by Maureen's influence, has decided not to comply. At Stiltsville, a cluster of old houses on stilts in Biscayne Bay, Chaz shoots Tool and knocks him overboard. Joey, positioned on the roof with a Ruger rifle, fires through the boat's windshield and reveals herself as alive. She tells Chaz she is going to the police with everything. Stranahan tells him to keep the money: The blackmail was never about cash but about accountability.

Chaz flees home and writes a suicide note, planning to fake his death and escape to Costa Rica. Tool, who survived the shooting, kicks in the door and knocks him unconscious. Tool and Hammernut shrink-wrap Chaz and drive him to Loxahatchee to execute him, but Tool deliberately misses with a shotgun, allowing Chaz to escape into the marsh. On the drive back, when Hammernut uses a racial slur about a man memorialized on one of Tool's collected highway-fatality crosses, Tool kills Hammernut by impaling him on the cross. Tool uses some of the cash to buy a truck, has his bullets surgically removed, and carries Maureen out of her convalescent home. They head north toward Canada to see the spring migration of white pelicans.

Rolvaag, learning of Hammernut's death and Chaz's abandoned vehicle, recognizes the case has resolved itself. When Stranahan brings Joey to meet him, she claims amnesia. Rolvaag is skeptical but accepts the story, privately deducing from credit card records that she has been alive all along. He tells Stranahan this is the first case where all the bad guys "canceled each other out."

In the Everglades, Chaz encounters the same hermit who rescued Ricca. The Captain tells Chaz he is not going back to Boca Raton and leads him deeper into the wilderness, quoting Tennyson: "Nature, red in tooth and claw." Chaz's fate is left ambiguous. Joey accepts Stranahan's invitation to stay on the island, having found both answers and genuine companionship.