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.