So what, exactly, is Key West Normal? Well, Key West Normal is when two friends in need of a place to live drag away an abandoned hot dog truck in the middle of the night... But an insomniac New Yorker has got himself trapped inside it while searching for his neurotic cat... And the truck is the secret hub of a global smuggling operation and holds a stash worth millions... But the tough guy sent to recover the fortune is way more interested in being reunited with his one true love. Most of all, though, Key West Normal is when none of the above seems at all improbable. It's just the way things are. Or at least how they are in the funky, funny, palm-shaded, all-accepting town at the end of the road. And when it falls to the unlikeliest pair of heroes--a homeless man named Pineapple and an ancient Mafioso known as Bert the Shirt--to sort through all the many twists and turns and save the day, well, that's Key West Normal to the max. Full of tropical sunshine and crackling dialogue, loopy wisdom and touching revelations from characters you'll root for, this feel-good novel will lift you like an ocean wave and remind you how good it feels to forget your worries and laugh out loud.

"Ogle captures this island city in all its quirky charm. Her story breezes along in typical Key West fashion--full of gossip and humor, with the jolt of a good cup of Cuban coffee."--Lee Irby, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg Parrotheads, Hemingway aficionados, and sun worshipers view Key West as a tropical paradise, and scores of writers have set tales of mystery and romance on the island. The city's real story--told by Maureen Ogle in this lively and engaging illustrated account--is as fabulous as fiction. In the early 1800s, the city's pioneer founders battled Indians, pirates, and deadly disease and created wealth beyond their imaginations. In the two centuries since, Key West has nurtured tragedy and triumph and has stood at the crossroads of American history. When Florida joined the Confederacy in 1861, Union troops seized control of strategically located Key West and city residents spent four years living under martial law. In the early 1890s, Key West Cubans helped Jose Marti launch the revolution that eventually ended Spain's control of their homeland. A few years later, the battleship Maine steamed out of Key West harbor on its last, tragic voyage. At the turn of the century, Henry Flagler astounded the entire country by building a technological marvel, an overseas railroad from mainland Florida to Key West, more than 100 miles long. In the 1920s and 1930s, painters, rumrunners, and writers (including Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost) discovered Key West. During World War II, the federal government and the military war machine permanently altered the island's landscape. In the second half of the 20th century, bohemians, hippies, gays, and jet-setters began writing a new chapter in Key West's social history. All of these personalities and events are wrapped in Ogle's unique and candid history of the island, an account that will fascinate past and present citizens of the Conch Republic, history buffs who like a well-told tale, and the millions of tourists from all over the world who love this colorful island city. Maureen Ogle is retired from the University of South Alabama.

A man is caught in a fight between his brother and a Mafia boss.

Instant New York Times bestseller One of Bustle’s Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2020 “The perfect riveting summer read!”—BookBub In 1935 three women are forever changed when one of the most powerful hurricanes in history barrels toward the Florida Keys. For the tourists traveling on Henry Flagler’s legendary Overseas Railroad, Labor Day weekend is an opportunity to forget the economic depression gripping the nation. But one person’s paradise can be another’s prison, and Key West-native Helen Berner yearns to escape. After the Cuban Revolution of 1933 leaves Mirta Perez’s family in a precarious position, she agrees to an arranged marriage with a notorious American. Following her wedding in Havana, Mirta arrives in the Keys on her honeymoon. While she can’t deny the growing attraction to her new husband, his illicit business interests may threaten not only her relationship, but her life. Elizabeth Preston's trip to Key West is a chance to save her once-wealthy family from their troubles after the Wall Street crash. Her quest takes her to the camps occupied by veterans of the Great War and pairs her with an unlikely ally on a treacherous hunt of his own. Over the course of the holiday weekend, the women’s paths cross unexpectedly, and the danger swirling around them is matched only by the terrifying force of the deadly storm threatening the Keys.

Meg and Peter Kaplan soon discover that their Key West house swap is a panic attack waiting to happen instead of a dream come true.

"Key West has a new hero...He weighs four pounds and stands eight inches off the ground. His name is Nacho and he's the bravest, shrewdest, funniest Chihuahua you will ever meet. He'll do anything to help his master, the retired Mafioso Bert the Shirt, and his friends--especially the beautiful Rita, with whom Nacho is smitten from the very first time she reaches down to scratch his ears. Wise-cracking Rita, straight out of Jersey, is new in town and needs a job. A gig at Wreckers Rum seems promising, but there's something, well, a little off about the place. It doesn't sell much booze, yet maintains a classy tasting room on prime Key West waterfront. Where's the money coming from? Who's the oddly chivalrous mobster behind the operation? What's up with the crazy scientist in flip-flops toiling away in his triple-locked lab behind the distillery? And how might Rita get closer to the irresistible but aloof young chief distiller whose only passion seems to be for making rum? Determined to find both answers and true love, undaunted Rita lands herself in some very hot water--hot rum, actually--and it will take a special kind of devoted and unleashed hero to rescue her. Oh...and one more thing about Nacho. He's not just brave; he talks, lending plenty of loopy canine wisdom to this rollicking, sun-drenched story of rum and romance, chemistry and crime, friendship, family, and the sacred responsibilities of loyalty."--Publisher's description.

True stories of writers and pirates, painters and potheads, guitar pickers and drug merchants in Key West in the 1970s. For Hemingway and Fitzgerald, there was Paris in the twenties. For others, later, there was Greenwich Village, Big Sur, and Woodstock. But for an even later generation—one defined by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and Hunter S. Thompson—there was another moveable feast: Key West, Florida. The small town on the two-by-four-mile island has long been an artistic haven, a wild refuge for people of all persuasions, and the inspirational home for a league of great American writers. Some of the artists went there to be literary he-men. Some went to re-create themselves. Others just went to disappear—and succeeded. No matter what inspired the trip, Key West in the seventies was the right place at the right time, where and when an astonishing collection of artists wove a web of creative inspiration. Mile Marker Zero tells the story of how these writers and artists found their identities in Key West and maintained their friendships over the decades, despite oceans of booze and boatloads of pot, through serial marriages and sexual escapades, in that dangerous paradise. Unlike the “Lost Generation” of Paris in the twenties, we have a generation that invented, reinvented, and found itself at the unending cocktail party at the end—and the beginning—of America’s highway.