Special Collections of the Orange County Library

To ever-loyal Kirby Winter, multimillionaire Uncle Omar left nothing -- nothing but a gold watch and a sealed letter to be opened in one year. But Kirby is destined to inherit the magical power to freeze time in its tracks. Power like that promises unlimited wealth, wealth that can't buy love, but does make a down payment on a lot of deadly trouble. In a universe without time, can Kirby stay one step ahead?

"Tropical Depression is the debut novel in a series featuring Billy Knight, an ex-LAPD officer trying to get away from his past while coping with runaway marlin, out-of-control tourists and other variegated elements in Key West, Florida. But when an old friend from the force drops in, Knight finds himself drawn back into a violent world he thought he had left behind."
Early novel by the creator of Dexter

Matthew Hope is a divorce lawyer in the town of Calusa, Florida, where the Gulf waters are warm and the women on the beach topless. One such woman, Michelle Benois Harper--a striking beauty with cascading black hair--enters Matthew's office revealing swollen eyes and a bruised and battered body. After making a statement with the cops saying her husband did it, her body is found on the beach, burned beyond recognition. George N. Harper is a hulking man with pockmarks, flaring nostrils, and rheumy eyes--the ugliest accused man Matthew has ever seen. But something's not quite right about the case--Harper loved his wife. Yet the cops and lawyers are ready to hang the man who could extinguish such a beautiful woman, and it's up to Matthew to prove his innocence. An instant classic in the Matthew Hope series from Ed McBain, Beauty and the Beast pairs the good-hearted lawyer with a client who tests his prejudices and proves beauty may be skin deep, but ugly is in the bones.

Speculative shorts by Florida authors.

Paul Rudolph, one of the 20th century's most iconoclastic architects, is best know--and most maligned--for his large "brutalist" buildings. The Florida houses, some eighty projects built between 1946 and 1961, brought modern architectural form into a gracious subtropical world of natural abundance.

Gone but not forgotten, the Xanadu house in Kissimmee. Learn about this intriguing conceptual sturcture that was unfortunately demolished a decade ago.

The golden age of Florida kitsch "The hotels, motels, and restaurants that catered to Florida's tourists before Disney have been lovingly explored, unearthed, highlighted, and celebrated in a lavishly illustrated 'souvenir' of a forgotten period in Florida history."--Brian Rucker, author of Arcadia and Image and Reality