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

Jeff couldn't let them get that far. He sped up. The other officers followed suit.

Clyde's passenger flung something out the window. Possibly a gun. Jeff only had a split second to note the location of where whatever it was flew into the scrub. The chase kept going. By then it had started to rain. They had drifted back into farm country. On a slick stretch of road, Clyde lost control of his vehicle. He hydroplaned, and no sooner had Jeff blinked than the Dodge had run off the side of the road. It hurtled past the ditch and crashed through a fence, sending posts flying into the air like Popsicle sticks. They rained down. Some stuck into the soft ground, standing straight up. The Dodge kept going through barbed wire. It finally stopped in a sod field, wheels spinning, stuck and flinging mud. The rain was really coming down by then. A witching-hour mist hovered over the grassland, and the air seemed colder than it should have been. It was a wet kind of cold that sticks in your bones and makes your jaw ache. In the swamp, the wet had a way of amplifying everything. It sharpened the cold, inflamed the heat, enveloped you, and made you aware of your skin and the heaviness of your body, that you were a corporeal thing, animal and fragile, and at risk in that wild country.

Clyde fumbled out into the slop and tried to run. He bent double, close to the ground, as if he could escape detection in the sawgrass. His passenger ran in the other direction. Like a snap, the officers ran after both. Jeff made for Clyde. He slogged over the wet earth, picking his knees up high with each step, but Clyde was almost to the tree line. Jeff drew his firearm and used the flashlight on its top to cut through the downpour. Seeing a suspect ready to wriggle out of his grasp, another officer might have shot. But Jeff had made it through his entire career without firing his weapon outside of training. He wasn't about to start now. He kept the safety on. This wasn't cops and robbers. Their pistols weren't toys or props, despite how some yahoos treated them. Jeff wasn't the kind to go out and act like a cowboy.

Instead he dug down deep in himself and found a burst of speed. He closed the gap between himself and Clyde, grabbed the man by the arm, and wrestled him to the ground, where they both got a mouthful of mud. Other officers closed in around them. As they read Clyde his rights and cuffed him, he looked over his shoulder and spotted Jeff.

"Buta, you're back!" Clyde exclaimed, using a nickname that only Jeff's intimates knew. After stalking this fellow through the woods for fifteen-some-odd years, Jeff supposed that made them familiar enough to be friendly even while on different sides of the law.

"Yep, I'm back," Jeff said. "Now, where's your gun?"

* * *

Jeff had first met Clyde some years ago, back when he was a new game warden in Manatee County. Jeff worked weekends and odd hours then, but on Sunday mornings, he took his son to catechism and followed along with Mass. In the pews next to him sat the same landowners who would call in tips about strange lights they saw in their woods at night. Next to these ranchers, unbeknownst to them, sat some of the same poachers whose spotlights had glinted among their trees.

On Sunday evenings, Jeff worked through the list of tips he kept in his black leatherette-bound notebook, some leads from conversations he'd had, others thoughts he'd jotted down. Jeff knew how to work a source. His greatest asset, he believed, was his mouth. Other bullet points were from the tip hotline. One tip referred to a man named Clyde, a convicted felon well known in those parts for getting drunk at local bars and boasting about his crimes to anyone who would listen, a veritable poacher tradition. Jeff followed the tip to an approximate location in the scrub. Soon he spotted lights bobbing among the trees. He chased the poachers down, but they made it to their truck before Jeff could nab them. A short chase ensued. While they sped through the backwoods, Jeff watched Clyde pass his rifle through the truck's back window and lay it in the bed.

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.