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Meet the Author: Jonathon King |
At four locations! Register today! |
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Join bestselling, Edgar-award winning author Jonathon King, creator of the Max Freeman crime series set in the Everglades and on the hard streets of urban South Florida as he talks about his latest book, “The Styx,” about the destruction of an African American Community in Palm Beach. Preregister. |
 About Jonathon King:
Edgar-award winning author Jonathon King is the creator of the Max Freeman crime series set in the Everglades and on the hard streets of urban South Florida. In his previous career as a journalist, he was a police and court reporter for 24 years with the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and the Philadelphia Daily News.
"I have basically cannibalized my past news writing career to create the crime novels I now write. I've been on dozens of crime scenes, sat for hours in courtrooms, spent three days in a Florida prison (as a guest) and interviewed too many cops and victims and criminals and traumatized family members."
"I've watched autopsies performed, sat in the back seat of a patrol car during a high-speed chase, had a gun pressed to the back of my head (mistaken for a dealer by an undercover cop) and sat in a bar with a detective watching a midget cocaine dealer lick the barbeque sauce off his stubby fingers while negotiating the sale of six kilos."
In 2000 King spent two wintry months alone in a mountain cabin in North Carolina hiding out and writing the manuscript for The Blue Edge of Midnight which won the 2002 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American author.
After writing three more novels in the series, King quit journalism and now writes full time South Florida. |
About the Book:
It is legend, the burning of the Styx. For over a hundred years the destruction of a black community on the blossoming new island of Palm Beach has been folklore. Historic photos prove the Styx existed, but century old memories muddle the truth of its demise. What happened to a rag tag collection of homes and rooming houses that once sheltered the great Henry Flagler's hotel workers at the turn of the 19th century? The legend is steeped in rumor, but the racism of the age, the uncommon wealth and privilege that came to the wilderness of Florida, and the greedy scramble to grab a piece of a new Eden, are undeniable truths. Jonathon King's novel, The Styx, is a fictional story of what happened in the later years of the 1890s when the great migration to Florida changed the state forever. With deft descriptions of New York's lower east side, the wild-west towns and villages of a newly discovered Florida, and the majesty of Palm Beach's new Royal Poinciana hotel, King tells a story of murder and cover-ups, power turned greedy, society women behaving badly, and good people doing what good people must always do to build a real civilization. |
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Posted: 04/21/2010 |
