Florida Books: The Best Books Set in the Sunshine State

Book Summary

Quenton Cassidy grew up surrounded by nature around the Loxahatchee River. As he explored, he was befriended by Trapper Nelson, “the Tarzan of the Loxahatchee,” a well-known eccentric who lives off the land, despite being warned about Trapper’s past.

In middle school, Quenton hoped to be a basketball star but showed more promise as a long-distance runner. Trapper also encourages his running as a way to further interact with nature. But, when Trapper is arrested for the murder of a moonshiner, Quenton’s loyalty to Trapper is tested. At the same time, Quenton has the perfect opportunity to make his mark as a gifted runner.

Book Summary

After a flood washes away much of a small Tennessee town, an evangelical preacher named Asher offers shelter to two gay men. With that one decision, he risks losing everything: his wife, with her religious prejudices; his congregation, which shuns him after he delivers a passionate sermon in defense of tolerance; and his 9-year-old son Justin, who gets caught in the middle of what becomes a bitter custody battle.

Asher wants to reconcile with her brother, Luke, whom he’d turned against years ago when Luke came out. He takes Justin to Key West in search of Luke, and there, at the southernmost point in the country, Asher and his son will find a new understanding of love.

Book Summary

In the 1980s, Augusta turned 80 years old and finally retired from her long career as a pharmacist. It was the perfect time to move to the Florida retirement community of Rallentando Springs in Florida. It’s there that she unexpectedly encounters the boy who broke her heart 60 years earlier, Irving Rivkin.

In 1920s Brooklyn, Augusta’s father was her role model. He owned a pharmacy and was the expert on everything their neighbors needed. After Augusta’s mother died, her great aunt Ester moved in to help the family and brought her own unique healing remedies for the pharmacy’s customers.

As Augusta heads to pharmacy college to follow in her father’s footsteps, she is torn between her dad’s and great-aunt’s different healing methodologies. She’s also forming a new relationship with their delivery boy – Irving. One day, Augusta impulsively uses Esther’s most potent elixir, and that decision has disastrous consequences.

Sixty years later, Augusta is still haunted by the mistake.

Book Summary

This historical fiction is set in a quiet Florida town, Moab, in the 1950s. Sheriff Brown’s daily activities usually involve gossip and drama among the town’s quirky residents. But one day, a seemingly mute 10-year-old girl arrives in Moab. At the same time, the Sheriff receives terrible personal news. 

The town tries to do the right thing and take the girl, Jessie, in and help her. They have no idea where she came from, but then two suspicious strangers show up looking for her. While Winston tries to get to the bottom of the girl’s origin, he’s also trying to keep his own secret.

Book Summary

While you may have heard of Thurgood Marshall and his appointment as the first Black Supreme Court Justice in 1967, his earlier career is lesser known to many of us. This non-fiction title transports us to 1949 Florida and an impactful civil rights case that almost cost the attorney his life.

Lake County, Florida, had a notorious sheriff named Willis V. McCall who was always quick to accuse and turn to violence, including when a 17-year-old white girl claimed rape. Without any evidence, four young Black men, who became known as “the Groveland Boys,” were quickly on McCall’s radar. He was intent on making them pay without going through due process. The Klan quickly arrived to help lynch the boys, and on their way into town, they burned the homes of Black families to the ground and chased hundreds more into the swamps.

The NAACP was involved in helping the boys’ legal case, but one of the legal associates was soon murdered for assisting with the case. Thurgood Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” then entered the fray that would come to include more deaths.

Book Summary

Kat and Blake first met at summer camp when they were just 12 years old. They had an instant connection, but their friendship was shattered when they learned that they were not just besties, but also half-sisters.

Fifteen years later, following the sudden death of their father, Kat and Blake discover that he’s left both of them the family beach house in Destin, Florida. This joint inheritance puts the sisters at immediate odds. Blake desperately needs the money (after being demoted from nanny to dog nanny) and wants to sell the house. Social media influencer Kat, on the other hand, desperately wants to hold onto the house because it holds so many happy childhood memories.

The two agree that they’ll spend the summer renovating the run-down beach house, and then Kat will buy Blake out. They immediately begin butting heads when Blake’s renovation plans don’t align with Kat’s artistic vision. As the summer goes on, the two must come to terms with their shared past and learn how to become sisters.

Book Summary

Kirby, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, and their two sons are preparing for the worst as a devastating hurricane approaches their Florida home. When the boys go missing right before the storm hits, Kirby heads out to find them. Then, his wife goes into premature labor while home alone. The baby is named Wanda after the storm, and is an unusual child.

As Wanda grows up, Florida continues to unravel, and many abandon it as nature reclaims the state.

Book Summary

Georgia is an antique expert, specifically Limoges fine china. She enjoys studying the past of others while trying to forget her own. She left her coastal Florida home ten years ago, and never thought she’d return. 

When a job brings her back home, her grandfather’s apiary brings her unexpected peace. However, a run-in with her estranged mom and sister brings ghosts of the past back to the forefront of her life. 

Book Summary

It’s the 1960s, and Elwood has been raised by his loving but strict grandmother. His hard work and focus on always doing the right thing are about to pay off. 

Elwood is getting ready to enroll in the local black college and has big dreams. Everything changes when an innocent mistake causes him to be sent to The Nickel Academy to be “reformed” from his so-called crimes.  

While the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys is fiction, it’s based on real “schools” and the unspeakable treatment of young Black men who were sent there during the 1960s. Elwood does his best to remain optimistic, but his positive attitude is challenged by his new friend Turner, who has experienced a different world growing up.

Book Summary

Letty’s sister Tanya made her promise that if anything happened to her, Letty would take Tanya’s daughter Maya and run. When Letty finds Tanya dead, she knows the murderer is Tanya’s ex, Evan, so she follows Tanya’s instructions to get out of town.

Tanya left behind a go-bag of cash, a massive diamond ring, and a faded magazine article about a small mom-and-pop hotel in a Florida beach town.

Letty heads south to Florida with four-year-old Maya, trying to comfort the child and unravel her sister’s secrets while keeping a low profile among the locals, including the handsome police chief Joe. Sisterhood, romance, and mystery intertwine throughout almost 500 pages, which is great if you’re looking for a longer option.

Book Summary

Three women’s stories intertwine in the Florida Keys as a powerful hurricane approaches over the Labor Day weekend of 1935.

Key West native Helen Berner yearns to escape her abusive husband. Elizabeth Preston has traveled down from New York in search of a veteran of the Great War. Mirta Perez’s family suffered great losses in the Cuban Revolution of 1933, and now they have arranged her marriage to a man in a dangerous business, followed by a honeymoon in Key West.

The approaching storm is not the only danger these women face as their paths unexpectedly cross.

Book Summary

This historical fiction tells the true story of Ann Lowe, who was one of the most famous dress designers of the twenties through the sixties. Her story began in Tampa, where she learned to be a seamstress from her mother and grandmother, a former slave. 

At only 12, Ann was married to an older, alcoholic man and saw her dreams slipping away. However, an encounter with a wealthy socialite changed her life forever. She has the opportunity to escape her marriage and earn a living by designing and sewing clothing for Florida’s society elite.

By 1953, Ann had a dress shop in New York and was preparing for the society wedding of the decade – Jacqueline Bouvier and John F. Kennedy. However, less than a week before the wedding, a disaster occurs at her dress shop, and she’s forced to recreate Jackie’s dress on an impossible timeline.

Book Summary

The Florida Keys were a nineteenth-century utopia, with the booming cigar industry making Key West the most prosperous city in Florida. But in 1886, the town was also a rebel base for the anticolonial insurgency in Cuba, making it a tinderbox for six friends with big dreams.

Set against the backdrop of the Great Fire of Key West, this historical fiction novel tells the stories of six young people whose lives intertwine as revolution smolders and passions ignite.

Book Summary

When Lily’s father dies, she’s surprised to inherit a beach cottage that she didn’t know he owned. While she’s never been big on lounging on a beach, she heads to the Gulf Coast home hoping to learn more. When she arrives, the shutters are peeling on the outside, but the inside is full of memorabilia.

Lily has never known much about her aunt, Lily-Mae. In fact, her mother refused to speak about her sister. The house contents include a carton of Lily-Mae’s journals that share stories Lily has never heard about her mother’s childhood in Tennessee, bringing new understanding about herself and her family.

Book Summary

In the 1920s, cities began to rise up from the Florida wetlands, from Coral Gables and Boca Raton to Miami Beach. The cities were developed with artistic vision and featured grand hotels that played host to the glitz and excess of the Roaring Twenties.

Gambling was condoned, and prohibition was not enforced. This attracted tycoons, crooks, and celebrities alike. This rapid development also spawned a new subdivision civilization. The decade saw the largest human migration in US history – far exceeding the settlement of the west – as millions flocked to this new American frontier in the sunshine.

This non-fiction book examines the social, economic, and environmental impacts of this boom. It also shows how the decisions of three real estate moguls, combined with a once-in-a-century hurricane, triggered the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression.

Book Summary

This book works as a stand-alone but is also the beginning of a new mystery series. After a long career, police detective Moira is ready to retire in paradise. She moves to a luxury retirement community, The Homestead, where things aren’t as peaceful as she hoped. 

Moira finds a dead young woman, surrounded by cash, floating in one of the community pools. Detective skills and instincts don’t shut down at retirement, so Moira finds herself investigating. Three of her new neighbors, also former officers, join her cause and are soon frustrating both the murderer and the local police.

Book Summary

Cecilia James has a new career as a music journalist, and she’s a sucker for a great love song. Her personal life with her father and boyfriend are both struggling, but she’s soon distracted by a music mystery as she writes a story for Rolling Stone.

Rock star Eddie Vee once dedicated his hit love songs to Sara Friedman, but then he disappeared into anonymity. Sara moved thousands of miles away toward a life she and Eddie once opposed. Can Cecilia convince them to open up about their broken hearts? Along the way, you’ll find many page-turning twists in both Cecilia’s and Sara’s lives.

Book Summary

In the first book of this series, Crazy in Paradise, Madison inherits her aunt’s beachfront rental cottages in the Florida Key. But the cottages don’t come with perfect vacationing families. Instead, she finds herself dealing with both colorful and shady tenants, including drunks, ex-convicts, and fugitives.

Her new tenants aren’t even her biggest challenge; a slimy lawyer and the former property manager have their own bad motivations. Madison’s life might not be as safe in Tarpon Grove as she expected.

Book Summary

Lacy is a lawyer and has worked as an investigator for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct for the last nine years. Most of her cases are uninteresting and deal with incompetent judges.

Greg was also a lawyer before he was disbarred, but now he is coming forward as a whistle-blower about a Florida judge who he says has stolen more money than all other crooked judges combined. He needs Lucy’s help to put a stop to the judge’s money-making scheme. But this is a dangerous case because the cash the judge is skimming involves a new casino on Native land, which was financed by the dangerous Coast Mafia.

Book Summary

Margo had her life planned out as debutant turned wife in 1961. But when her engagement is broken off, and her family endures a scandal, her future changes dramatically.

Instead of becoming a posh housewife, she becomes an assistant to photographer Slim Aarons, who is known for vibrant pictures of high society, royalty, and Hollywood stars. Margo is thrust into a jet-setting life from Acapulco to Manhattan and interacts with the biggest names of the decades, like Jackie Kennedy, Truman Capote and his Swans, and a host of Vanderbilts.

When Margo and Slim arrive in Palm Beach, she is swept up into the city’s social circle and befriends heiress and rising designer Lilly Pulitzer. But soon, her loyalties will be tested, and secrets may be revealed.