Radioactive

Scott Powers Captures Florida Sleaze With Nuclear Glow

Scott Powers’ The Space Coast Tatler is a marvelous race-against-the-clock thriller with a radioactive twist and a masterful portrayal of Florida sleaze, squalor, casual bloodshed and eternally transient folkways.

The author is a journalist with thirty years of experience covering space launches, the boom-and-bust nature of this fickle quest for weightless glory and the politics of this now deeply red state, which gives his novel an authenticity that echoes the early work of the late, great John D. MacDonald in its keen eye for the Sunshine State’s overripe venality.

Florida is also infamous for crimes of high weirdness and outrageous acts of corruption, which makes reality a hard act for a fiction writer to follow, let alone trump. But Powers is more than a match for this challenge, serving up an outlandish MacGuffin -- a sunken cooler stuffed with uranium 233, a man-made isotope with a nasty byproduct, uranium 232.

This deadly and illicit stockpile fuels the diabolical plot of a reclusive billionaire who wants to build and detonate a small nuclear bomb off the coast of Cape Canaveral to destroy the historic launch facilities of NASA and the U.S. Space Force in order to protect his own private network of highly lucrative space satellites.

They say there’s no honor among thieves, a truism given life by the low-rent characters the billionaire hired to smuggle the stockpile to Florida, including a double-crossing shrimp boat skipper who stole the radioactive stash and buried it in that sunken cooler.

Bad juju follows. The skipper and five other shady characters get massacred by a gang of bikers in a backwoods dive bar called the Tin Roof Tavern. The mass murder remains a gory and unsolved mystery; a crime the billionaire and his bought-and-paid-for state legislator don’t want the local sheriff to solve. Neither does the FBI, none too thrilled about the missing nuclear pellets and their catastrophic potential.

They also say nature abhors a vacuum -- almost as much as a journalist hates an unanswered question. Enter the bear-like curmudgeon Mac MacGregor, editor of the local weekly rag with a name captured in the title of this book.

Said to be a big-time Boston reporter who tangled with the mob and got bounced out of town, Mac knows there’s a story that needs telling but lacks the resources to crack the case. He does what he can, assigning the story to the latest fresh fish to fill an entry-level reporter’s post, a sink-or-swim task for a newbie surreptitiously backed by Mac, who works his own sources and keeps his youngster on track.

Powers really shines in realistic scenes that show how real journalists work their sources -- and how the cops, lawyers, pols and government officials work them. Lots of push and pull going on, with deals that would make Hildy Johnson proud.

The freshest fish in Mac’s little pond is Stevie Guthrie, hitting town fresh out of college with a chip on his shoulder placed there by his rich father. Guthrie is also a magnet for trouble, a would-be Galahad who chases off a guy beating on a young woman outside his motel room only to be mistaken for the assailant by the woman and the motel owner.

But Guthrie’s got moxie and a nose for news. He’s also got a pair of irregulars helping him out -- Sally, a mystic young woman who hears dead people and has a kleptomaniac brother in prison, and Marvin, an out-of-work engineer flipping burgers and doing gig work while waiting on the next big space project to start hiring.

This mismatched trio doesn’t seem heroic, but with pluck and luck, they make some major discoveries, including the name of an FBI agent charged with tracking down the missing atomic pellets and an ultra-hot spot in the wall of the Tin Roof Tavern.

They’re going to need all the luck they can get when the missing pellets are found again by a nerdy bank clerk who hooks the cooler while trying to teach himself how to fish. First the nerd gets a bad case of terminal radiation sickness. Then he gets grabbed by one of the bikers who turned the Tin Roof Tavern into a slaughterhouse -- killed then chopped up and fed to the gators.

This serves as a starting gun for all the players on both sides of this atomic plot to reassemble, racing against each other to either blow up the Space Coast or stop the bombmakers dead in their tracks.

In Stevie and Mac’s case, there’s another prize -- a blockbuster story that will draw national attention, make the reputation of a cub reporter and burnish the legacy of a crusty, old pro. Can Stevie pull it off without getting killed? Can Mac keep his fresh fish alive?

Pick up a copy of this lively yarn to find out.