Like any big-city paramedic, Shaw Chandler had probably seen a thousand suicides. But he knows a murder when he sees one--and this time it's his own father. Suddenly he's got a metal canister marked "U.S. Navy" in his hands, as he's dragged back to the crazed coral shores of his birthplace, sunny Key West, to explain it. There, two people from Chandler's past--an impassioned doctor harboring his own long-buried secrets and his seductive actress-daughter, Trula--hold the key to a bizarre environmental scam turned deadly. And as the snares of a suspicious trap of "suicides" close about him, Chandler confronts a deranged killer with a negative IQ, a knack for rhyme, and a genius for killing... and the psychotic mastermind behind the southernmost monopoly on death...