Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

Mixing stranger-than-fiction true crime with regional history and flashes of memoir, this fascinating debut from science journalist and Florida native Renner follows two men on opposite sides of the law. Jeff Babauta was a clean-cut and conscientious Florida Fish and Wildlife officer nearing retirement when he was recruited to investigate poaching in the mid-2010s. Under a new identity—the long-haired, freewheeling Curtis Blackledge—he began running an alligator farm in Arcadia, Fla., to gather information about poachers and curb their operations. On a parallel track, Renner tells the story of 20th-century alligator poaching legend Peg Brown and his exploits on the Ten Thousand Islands of Everglades National Park, “a many-faceted archipelago of tangled mangroves... with evocative names like Lostmans River.” In an attempt to separate man from myth, Renner visited the islands herself and researched how outsiders, from Spanish conquistadors to oil drillers, have negatively impacted them. As she and Babauta eventually learned, the official establishment of Everglades Park in the 1940s “pushed whole communities into crime” by reclassifying multigenerational families of hunters as poachers. Renner teases out the moral ambiguities with a grace and rigor reminiscent of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. Beautifully evoking the “sawgrass plains and wild strands of jungle” of its author’s home state, this tale of power, politics, and tradition is a triumph. Agent: Julia Eagleton, Janklow & Nesbit. (Nov.)