Wrecker

Fifteen-year-old Valdez Jones VIII—who calls himself Wrecker “because his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather salvaged shipwrecks for a living”—is fishing off the coast of Key West when a boat speeding outside the navigation markers becomes stuck in the shoal. The boat’s owners try persuading him to tug them free, but Wrecker—wary of their lack of boating know-how and of damaging his own skiff—says he can’t do it. Despite his refusal, they toss him a wad of cash, insisting that he keep it and that Wrecker “never saw us, okay, ’cause we were never here.” Now, Wrecker suddenly sees the boaters everywhere, including at the marina and the cemetery, where he works a part-time gig cleaning gravestones. When one of the strangers from the shoal—a silver-mustachioed man—employs Wrecker to keep a lookout on one particular gravestone, Wrecker worries that he’s gotten himself involved in something sketchy. Set during the Covid-19 lockdown, this enigmatic read by Hiaasen (Squirm) blends ecological conservation, family drama, and Key West history to present a multilayered telling with all the hallmarks of a thrilling heist. Wrecker’s biracial (Black Bahamian and white) identity, and the ways in which it influences his interactions with the police, is empathetically wrought. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM Partners. Ages 10–up. (Sept.)