Bone Deep

A Whacky, Weird Florida Mystery

In Florida, even the dead don’t stay buried.

Danny “Gumbo” Malone thought he was signing up for a simple recovery job—three stolen fossils, a quiet collector in Gainesville, and a tidy $500-a-day payday. Easy math.

Until he walks into a suburban house that’s secretly a private Ice Age museum… and discovers the missing pieces aren’t souvenirs.

They’re black-market megafauna.

A near-complete mastodon skull.

A museum-quality dire wolf cranium.

Rare giant ground sloth vertebrae pulled from Florida riverbeds—illegal to own, priceless to collectors, and worth killing over in the right market.

The client can’t call the police.

The broker might be compromised.

And the deeper Gumbo digs into Florida’s underground fossil trade, the more he realizes this isn’t a random theft—it’s a territorial war between rival supply chains moving millions in prehistoric contraband.

From the oak-canopied streets of Gainesville to the backroads of Ocala, from a Tampa parking garage briefing to a gravel-shoulder standoff with a lifted F-250 and a man who runs North Florida like it’s his personal preserve, Gumbo finds himself caught between two powerful operators who both think the other blinked first.

He’s just the guy hired to return stolen property.

They see him as a message.

Packed with:

Florida noir atmosphere

Offbeat humor and dry, deadpan wit

Black-market fossil trafficking

River divers, brokers, and underground collectors

Organized crime with a Southern drawl

High-stakes territorial disputes

A reluctant PI who’d rather be fixing his boat

BONE DEEP is a sharp, stylish Florida mystery about greed, territory, and the strange economics of ancient bones in a modern world.

Because in Florida, the past isn’t history.

It’s inventory.