Wrecker
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Wrecker needs to deal with smugglers, grave robbers, and pooping iguanas—just as soon as he finishes Zoom school. Welcome to another wild adventure in Carl Hiaasen's Florida!
Valdez Jones VIII calls himself Wrecker because his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather salvaged shipwrecks for a living.
So is it destiny, irony, or just bad luck when Wrecker comes across a speedboat that has run hard aground on a sand flat? The men in the boat don't want Wrecker to call for help—in fact, they'll pay him to forget he ever saw them.
Wrecker would be happy to forget, but he keeps seeing these men all over Key West—at the marina, in the cemetery, even right outside his own door. And now they want more than his silence—they want a lookout.
He'll have to dive deep into their shady dealings to figure out a way to escape this tangled net. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fifteen-year-old Valdez Jones VIII—who calls himself Wrecker "because his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather salvaged shipwrecks for a living"—is fishing off the coast of Key West when a boat speeding outside the navigation markers becomes stuck in the shoal. The boat's owners try persuading him to tug them free, but Wrecker—wary of their lack of boating know-how and of damaging his own skiff—says he can't do it. Despite his refusal, they toss him a wad of cash, insisting that he keep it and that Wrecker "never saw us, okay, 'cause we were never here." Now, Wrecker suddenly sees the boaters everywhere, including at the marina and the cemetery, where he works a part-time gig cleaning gravestones. When one of the strangers from the shoal—a silver-mustachioed man—employs Wrecker to keep a lookout on one particular gravestone, Wrecker worries that he's gotten himself involved in something sketchy. Set during the Covid-19 lockdown, this enigmatic read by Hiaasen (Squirm) blends ecological conservation, family drama, and Key West history to present a multilayered telling with all the hallmarks of a thrilling heist. Wrecker's biracial (Black Bahamian and white) identity, and the ways in which it influences his interactions with the police, is empathetically wrought.
