The Ripple Effect Murders

"Inevitable!"

Looking back weeks later, it was the single word which special agent Jake McCall had come to use in describing the series of murders which the seamy side of the Key West lifestyle was suddenly producing. The sexually liberal "anything goes" philosophy of the Keys had become the comfortable venue for a killer who obviously felt camouflaged in the gay-lesbian community where bizarre behavior was not the exception, but the norm. A community which, sooner or later, would foreseeably become the haven for a sexual predator turned killer.

But McCall had come to the Florida Keys to fish.

Following an intense and dangerous battle with a Mexican cartel drug lord, McCall had hoped to escape his FBI duties with a few days of bonefishing in the Keys. When a small unmanned boat drifted across his favorite fishing spot in Madeira Bay, Jake towed it in and alerted the Marine Patrol to locate the owner, never dreaming a load of cocaine was hidden below its deck.

Now involuntarily involved with the DEA in a search for the boat's owner, Jake is enlisted to lead a team back into the hidden recesses of Madeira Bay where they discover dismembered body parts, obviously belonging to the drug boat driver and exhibiting the grisly trademark of a killer who earlier had left the remains of two young party girls near the Key West airport.

The killer's weapon of choice, an expensive custom-made fisherman's knife, has been used to dissect victims with surgical precision, purposefully leaving the bodies easily discoverable as if to showcase the handiwork.

Complicating the investigation is an interwoven drug smuggling scheme, apparently the brainchild of the bisexual killer and ultimately involving Jake in a cross-country manhunt which ends in Las Vegas where the Gay Pride Extravaganza is again used by the killer as the backdrop for more killing and the eventual kidnapping of a beautiful female FBI agent.