Excerpt from Gator Country by Rebecca Renner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The radio squawked once more, rousing Jeff from his ruminations. The chopper had spotted lights in the brush not far away, outside the little town of Wauchula. When the closest officer checked in on the man and his accomplice, they sprinted to their pickup truck, jumped in, and fled. That officer was in pursuit already, but the suspect refused to pull over. They had a car chase on their hands. Dispatch summoned all nearby units to join the pursuit. Sheriff's deputies were on their way as well. So much for that quiet night.

"Let's go to work!" Jeff exclaimed to Mack, and the dog perked up.

Jeff snapped his seat belt and flicked on his lights and sirens. They wailed into the silence of the grove, now lit a swimming blue. He peeled out and sped through the back roads, heading for where he predicted the chase would go. He swerved onto the county road, and there, ahead of him, a single set of blue lights was shrinking rapidly into the distance. Jeff floored it.

Speeding off in pursuit always got Jeff's blood up. He felt alive, excited. He was doing something to protect that wild country instead of just thinking about it. But also, he admitted, he liked to go fast, to get out on a clean stretch of road, so straight that he could see the wink of oncoming headlights from miles away, and really open up his engine. He raced between the pines and cypresses, zipping around a semi-truck like a streak of light beneath the tufts of palm heads standing on their spindly trunks below a limitless sky and its splash of stars.

The blue lights in front of him grew until he was right behind them. He and the first officer had a quick exchange over the radio. The officer was pulling information on the license plate, but Jeff already knew who it was. He recognized the truck, a green Dodge with a topper. It belonged to a man named Clyde, a habitual poacher. The last time Jeff saw Clyde was when he sent the man to prison. That was several years ago. In the intervening time, Jeff had worked in the Florida panhandle. Even while he was away, landowners in Manatee County, his old jurisdiction south of Tampa Bay, called him up to shoot the breeze and tell him about any nefarious goings-on down there in the swampland. One had said Clyde had gotten out of prison and was back at it again, not only poaching but frequenting local bars and hangouts and bragging about how many deer he'd killed. Jeff was nothing if not meticulous. He wrote himself a note—he kept notes for everything—to check in on Clyde and others if he ever worked in Manatee again.

So when Jeff transferred back a few weeks prior, he began to investigate the leads from his notes. He asked around about Clyde but didn't find anything. Now here he was, racing through the swamp with a growing herd of black-and-whites on his tail.

Clyde wouldn't let up. The chase zagged from Hardee County down into DeSoto, deep river country beneath enormous live oak trees heavy with Spanish moss, before swinging into gladeland, back roads, sawgrass, and open sky. By two thirty in the morning, they had careened across three different counties, twenty-one miles. Their attempts to cut Clyde off or reroute him had failed. They reached speeds over a hundred miles per hour, going so fast that Jeff could smell his transmission burning. Now the Dodge veered onto a levee, lit from above by the helicopter's spotlight.

He's going for the canal, Jeff thought. If they got to it, the suspects could steal a boat—or perhaps hop into one that was waiting for them—and abscond into the alligators' kingdom like many a fugitive before them, never to be found.

They had left the domain of so-called civilization behind and had entered the swamp. There, the primordial past still reigned, stubborn and unconquerable, rebuffing all the future's attempts to push its way in. The swamp has swallowed whole planned subdivisions. A Space Race–era rocket facility sits abandoned in the southern glades, its warehouses and missile silos the prey of wet air, graffiti, and nature as the land takes itself back. Shot-up planes downed in cypress domes tell the story of cocaine cowboys and a lawlessness that lives on just out of sight. Skeletons of 1940s automobiles nestle in the saw palm fronds. People have dumped just about everything in the glades: cigarette machines, backhoes, pet snakes, dead bodies. In that country, it is easy to disappear. It's almost hard not to.

Excerpted from Gator Country by Rebecca Renner. Copyright © 2023 by Rebecca Renner. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.