Scavenger Reef [Hardcover]

Laurence Shames (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 1994

Presumed dead after a boating accident, Key West artist Augie Silver suddenly returns, angering the owners of original Augie Silver paintings who were prepared to profit from his demise. By the author of Florida Straits. 30,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Following up his hilarious Florida Straits , Shames delivers another dose of criminal high jinks in relentlessly bohemian Key West, although this tale falls a little short of the first's full measure of fun. The questionable artistic merit of iconoclastic painter Augie Silver doesn't matter much while he's still alive--not to him, his lovely wife and local smalltime gallery owner Nina, nor to their gay houseboy Reuben. But when Augie's ship fails to return to harbor after a January sail, things quickly change. Those with Augie Silver art in their possession contemplate their sudden wealth. One considers the purchase of charter boats, another support of his floundering poetic career, a third a new wardrobe of black clothing. Further up the economic scale, a New York gallery owner and her bankrupt husband anticipate high profits as they make a quick grab for all the available Silver pieces. Then Augie returns from his watery grave. Surely prices will drop. Oh, if only Augie were really and truly dead. Such authors as Carl Hiassen and Elmore Leonard also mine the venal weirdness of the Sunshine State, but Shames offers sharp-edged parody without a trace of meanness, portraying his craven cast with a bold, new affection. Perhaps it was only the newness that made the earlier story seem fresher than this. Readers will look forward to the next tale to find out.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Augie Silver is a successful Key West artist whose work brings a decent, if not extraordinary, price at the finer New York galleries. Then Augie, an avid sailor, disappears into the Carribean. His wife, Nina, grieves, and his friends hoist a few to his memory. Meanwhile, Augie's agent organizes a retrospective exhibit of the Silver collection; the show is a huge success, and the value of Augie's art goes through the roof, prompting the painter's friends to realize that the pictures hanging on their walls, largely gifts from their pal Augie, are now worth a fortune. Hold everything! Here's Augie, alive again. His boat broke apart in a storm, but he floated ashore and, after a bout of amnesia, has finally returned to his beloved Nina. She's overjoyed, but Augie's friends--seeing their anticipated pile of lucre shrink--aren't so sure. Soon Arnie's life is in danger again--this time from someone trying to protect his or her investment. Carefully drawn characters--Key West eccentrics, mostly--and a languid, poetic style combine with a clever plot for an unusual and very entertaining mystery. Wes Lukowsky

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (February 15, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671864939
• ISBN-13: 978-0671864934
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #766,853 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laurence Shames has been a New York City taxi driver, lounge singer, furniture mover, lifeguard, dishwasher, gym teacher, and shoe salesman. Having failed to distinguish himself in any of those professions, he turned to writing full-time in 1976 and has not done an honest day's work since.

His basic laziness notwithstanding, Shames has published twenty books and hundreds of magazine articles and essays. Best known for his critically acclaimed series of eight Key West novels, he has also authored non-fiction and enjoyed considerable though largely secret success as a collaborator and ghostwriter. Shames has penned four New York Times bestsellers. These have appeared on four different lists, under four different names, none of them his own. This might be a record.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1951, to chain-smoking parents of modest means but flamboyant emotions, Shames did not know Philip Roth, Paul Simon, Queen Latifa, Shaquille O'Neal, or any of the other really cool people who have come from his hometown. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU in 1972 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. As a side note, both his alma mater and honorary society have been extraordinarily adept at tracking his many address changes through the decades, in spite of the fact that he's never sent them one red cent, and never will.

It was on an Italian beach in the summer of 1970 that Shames first heard the sacred call of the writer's vocation. Lonely and poor, hungry and thirsty, he'd wandered into a seaside trattoria, where he noticed a couple tucking into a big platter of fritto misto. The man was nothing much to look at but the woman was really beautiful. She was perfectly tan and had a very fine-gauge gold chain looped around her bare tummy. The couple was sharing a liter of white wine; condensation beaded the carafe. Eye contact was made; the couple turned out to be Americans. The man wiped olive oil from his rather sensual lips and introduced himself as a writer. Shames knew in that moment that he would be one too.

He began writing stories and longer things he thought of as novels. He couldn't sell them.

By 1979 he'd somehow become a journalist and was soon publishing in top-shelf magazines like Playboy, Outside, Saturday Review, and Vanity Fair. (This transition entailed some lucky breaks, but is not as vivid a tale as the fritto misto bit, so we'll just sort of gloss over it.) In 1982, Shames was named Ethics columnist of Esquire, and also made a contributing editor to that magazine.

By 1986 he was writing non-fiction books. The critical, if not the commercial, success of these first established Shames' credentials as a collaborator/ghostwriter. His 1991 national bestseller, Boss of Bosses, written with two FBI agents, got him thinking about the Mafia. It also bought him a ticket out of New York and a sweet little house in Key West, where he finally got back to Plan A: writing novels. Given his then-current preoccupations, the novels naturally featured palm trees, high humidity, dogs in sunglasses, and New York mobsters blundering through a town where people were too laid back to be afraid of them. But this part of the story is best told with reference to the books themselves, so please stick around and explore them.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good read, great characters, November 30, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Scavenger Reef (Mass Market Paperback)

I stumbled upon this author after exhausting myself on James W. Hall and Carl Hiassen. It was arguably the best mystery book I've ever read in which no murder is ever committed! (Don't worry, I didn't give anything away.) Shames' lead character, Augie, is a refreshing change from the genre's typical hard-boiled, prone-to-violence protagonist. And Reuben, the gay servant, is a true hero. A pleasure to read! I'll be looking into more Shames titles.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shames leaves thugs and enters a world of light, September 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Scavenger Reef (Mass Market Paperback)

With Scavenger Reef, Laurence Shames leaves his entertaining crowd of displaced mafia thugs and paints a stunning portrait of a creative life in a real-world (if Kew-West-surreal) context. As a growing fan of the Florida mysteries by Leonard, Hiaasen, Hall, Shames, and others I like to identify what I consider the Key Book by each author, the one you most eagerly recommend. With Leonard it's La Brava. Tourist Season is the Key Book from Carl Hiaasen as is Under Cover of Daylight for James W. Hall. For Laurence Shames I definitely recommend Scavenger Reef. The usual literary portrayal of artists is as hacks, or as painters of alegorical canvases that serve the needs of the novel but which never sound like a painting you'd want to look at. The qualities of Augie Silver's canvases are abstract and radiant, they inform the descriptions of every setting in the book. Within this well-told story of friends and enemies is a startling sense of light and space.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clever Tale!!!, July 26, 2006

By 

jeanne-scott (Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scavenger Reef (Mass Market Paperback)

Scavenger Reef is the story of an artist whose death could increase his net worth into the millions!! An art dealer schemes to make big money when the artist is reported dead, money that will set her up for life, at a time when her options are quickly running out. As the grand scheme proceeds, several people who own paintings realize that they too can make enough money to dig themselves out of the holes they have dug. The only problem is, what if the artist is in fact alive? Who would be willing or desperate enough to keep the money making plans moving forward, even if that would involve lies, betrayal and ultimately murder.
I found the characters to be entertaining and borderline zany!! What they lack in moral spine , they make up for with an earnest enthusiasm for doing the wrong thing in pursuit of the almighty dollar. This is a tale that romps through-out Key West in the "classic- Florida" manner of taking the story way over the top!!!