Lori Roy finds darkness, star power in ‘Lake County’

“Lake County” opens with the aroma of orange blossoms, but it’s not long before you catch the scent of death.

This book, the sixth historical thriller by St. Petersburg writer Lori Roy, captures 1950s Florida so evocatively you might break into a sweat while you read it. Or that could be a reaction to its tense and tightly woven Southern noir plot.

Roy’s five earlier novels, including the Edgar Award winners “Bent Road” and “Let Me Die in His Footsteps,” all have rural or small-town settings. She’s adept at finding the deep shadows amid the sunny stereotypes of those places, and she certainly does it in “Lake County.”

She kicks off the tension in the very first pages with a nerve-wracking scene in, of all places, a grocery store. It’s narrated by Addie Ann Buckley, one of the book’s main characters, an almost-18-year-old girl who’s lived all her life in the itty-bitty town of Hockta in Central Florida’s Lake County, and she cannot wait to flee it.

Roy captures Addie Ann’s teenage voice, alternately dreamy and petulant, and draws us into her fear in that grocery store. She’s shopping with her aunt, who’s being pursued by a bad man named Siebert Rix, and Addie Ann is tasked with protecting her from Rix.

“Until he’d stepped off the train,” she tells us, “I never knew how many corners there were in this town, spots that left a person blind to what was dead ahead.”

But Addie Ann is distracted by another man. Her boyfriend, Truitt Holt, is not a bad man; she believes he’s the love of her life. But he’s problematical — her parents don’t approve of him because he makes his living running a bolita game in Lake County. It’s not just the gambling that worries them: Bolita across Florida is controlled by the Tampa Mafia, who are not kind to independent operators.

Addie Ann has a plan, though. In a few days, as a birthday gift, she’ll be leaving on a six-week trip with her Aunt Jean, first to California and then to New York. She doesn’t plan to return, although her doting parents don’t know it. Instead, she’ll write to Truitt and he’ll join her in the new life she imagines for herself, a life as glamorous and glittering as the one Aunt Jean leads when she’s not visiting Hockta.

The life where the world knows her as Marilyn Monroe.

Monroe, the 1950s goddess of the silver screen, grocery shopping in Hockta?

Roy makes it plausible by connecting her characters to the star’s real biography. Monroe, who was born Norma Jeane Mortenson, grew up mostly in foster care in Los Angeles because of her mother’s repeated bouts of mental illness. In Roy’s fictional version, young Jean bonds with Inez, a girl a few years older who often protects her. As an adult, Inez marries a man named Harden Buckley, who’s from Hockta.

Their home there, with a daughter and son, becomes a refuge for Jean when the weight of being Marilyn Monroe becomes too much for her, sometimes bringing on deep depression. She drops the breathy voice, the elaborate makeup, the slinky clothes, and peels potatoes in Inez’s kitchen.

Everyone in town knows who she is, of course, but most of them leave her in peace, except for the relentless woman who writes the local newspaper’s gossip column.

It might be hard to imagine that happening, but “Lake County” is set in 1955. Celebrity culture now is a voracious monster, but in those days, blessedly free of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, stardom was a much less intrusive affair.

Disturbing Jean’s peace this visit is Siebert Rix. He was in foster care along with Jean and Inez, and as a professional photographer he’s played a role in Monroe’s success. But he’s domineering and hot-tempered; a recent argument with Jean at the Buckley house ended with him dislocating her shoulder — and Harden Buckley beating him bloody.

Monroe has been fictionalized by everyone from Joyce Carol Oates to James Ellroy, not to mention hundreds of biographies of her by writers ranging from Gloria Steinem to Norman Mailer. Roy treats her with more empathy than she sometimes gets, and portrays her as a complex human being rather than a cultural phenomenon.

Monroe is an integral part of the fast-paced plot of “Lake County,” which kicks into gear when Truitt stops to help Rix change a flat tire on the roadside and becomes a whopping example of that old truism about no good deed going unpunished.

People will die, secrets will be revealed, and there will be a mind-blowing encounter with a Mafia boss in an Ybor City nightclub. Jean’s life, and Addie Ann’s, will take unexpected turns in this darkly satisfying road trip to a long-gone Florida.

Lake County

By Lori Roy

Thomas & Mercer, 291 pages, $28.99

Meet the author

Lori Roy will be in conversation about “Lake County” with Tampa Bay Times book editor Colette Bancroft at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Tombolo Books, 2153 First Ave. S., St. Petersburg. Free; RSVP at tombolobooks.com/events.