Alexander Strange lives and works aboard a fishing trawler in Naples, Florida writing about news of the weird. His laid-back lifestyle is disrupted when a feisty author of conspiracy books insists he investigate the death of her brother in Key West. Her name is Silver, and the cops think her brother’s death was an accident, a scuba diving mishap caused by nitrogen narcosis. But Silver doesn’t buy it. She believes he was murdered, and the motivation behind his killing is far more noxious. When she tells Alexander her brother’s last words to her were, “I found a mermaid,” it’s a story too good for a weird-news reporter to resist. But when the bullets start flying and the sharks start circling, he realizes he’s gotten into something literally over his head.

Weird news reporter Alexander Strange is munching grouper balls and sipping a Cuba Libre when a naked body floats up to the dock at Stan’s Idle Hour in Goodland, Florida. It’s already been a hell of a day—earlier, somebody tried to poison his fried okra. The face of the corpse has been devoured by sea creatures, but Alexander knows who she is, and from the ligature marks on her neck, it appears she’s been strangled. Or hanged. Alexander fears he’s being framed when police find a bloodstained noose under his dry-docked fishing trawler where he lives with his dog Fred and Mona the mannequin. He needs help, and it arrives in the form of a urinal-screen-salesman-turned-detective and a gorgeous public defender who wants more than to find the victim’s killer: She want’s Alexander to forego his “catch-and-release” love life–and ditch Mona.When an inmate in the county jail is found hanged by a rope identical to the one found under Alexander’s trawler, the stakes get higher. The trio must discover who is behind all this mayhem before they, too, find themselves on the end of a rope.