Still Waters

Drawing on her knowledge of Florida’s navigable waterways, environmental activist Sara Warner’s debut novel, mystery thriller Still Waters (2012), combines a fast-paced, twist-filled plot with detours into Floridian culture and ecology. The novel contains two simultaneous plots: the story of an EPA researcher trying to protect public land from private commercial interests, and the story of a rancher doing her best to avoid government involvement on her land. Complicating matters is the fact that the rancher’s plotline is a story within a story—she is a character in a novel that the EPA scientist is writing. Still Waters won the 2013 Grand Prize for Fiction from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

By day, 30-something Teena Shostekovich works for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection as a researcher focusing on the riparian (or water boundary) rights of the state’s navigable lakes and rivers. Most of the cases she and her coworkers are tasked with solving involve private companies or individuals illegally converting these waterways into private land in secret, usually for a huge profit. Her work is hampered by Florida’s Governor, whose “rabidly big business” mindset has earned him the nickname “Dud” and who is eager to privatize state employees to get rid of the agency altogether so that no one stands in the way of corporate destruction of Florida’s fragile ecosystems.

When the novel opens, Teena is on a “hot potato” case—not only is there a complicated land dispute involved, but also the parties who ultimately stand to lose based on Teena’s research are politically very powerful.



By night, Teena is a would-be writer drafting her first novel. Her hero is Jessie Weston, a fiercely independent rancher, who is also a fictionalized version of Teena’s real-life adversaries in the case. She writes from Jessie’s perspective partly in a generous nod to the fact that the opposition has a sympathetic point to make about their land, and as a way of more deeply connecting to the case, hoping to come to a more fair solution.

Jessie lives on a ranch she runs with her father on the shores of fictional Lake Ponder. Together, they have built a dike on the lakebed that abuts their property in order to create more pastureland. This earns them the ire of a fictionalized version of Teena’s boss, Florida EPA head Steve Donneroe. In the course of fighting the state’s incursions into what Jessie sees as her private business, Jessie becomes a budding biologist who hopes to find evidence supporting her defense of the dike.

One day, Teena returns home from work to find that an unusual theft has occurred: Someone has stolen the hard drive from her computer, making off with nothing except the only copy of her novel—six months of work gone. Confused and dismayed, Teena contacts the police. At the same time, she receives a phone call from a man who identifies himself as the thief of the files offering to help Teena become the published writer she so desperately wants to be. This phone call turns into a series of increasingly flirtatious email exchanges as Teena and the thief banter about their mutual love of 19th-century French author Flaubert and his most famous novel, Madame Bovary.



Logan Deo, the detective assigned to Teena’s case, takes an interest both in solving the theft and in getting to know Teena better. They grow close enough to sleep together, but soon Logan’s sleuthing becomes dangerous. When he gets too close to the real culprit, he winds up dead—and Teena finds herself under scrutiny as a potential murderer. Then, to add to the sense of closing-in peril, Teena unexpectedly receives a call from her ex-husband, Mack, who has figured out that the case Teena is working on is somehow connected to the world of international terrorism.

Meanwhile, in Jessie’s world, her father dies under mysterious circumstances, and she finds her claim to the land and the ranch contested in probate court by the nefarious Bobby, Teena’s lightly fictionalized version of Bud, a terrifying man who is fighting the state in her real life. In a climactic conclusion, Teena and Jessie’s stories collide, as Bud/Bobby poisons the marshy lakebed to devalue the land and is seemingly responsible for the death of Jessie’s father. In a last-minute attempt to settle the issue once and for all, Teena offers her adversary a proposed settlement on behalf of the state: They will remove the dike in exchange for the state’s agency leaving the ranch alone from then on.

However, readers complain that the novel’s ending leaves too many unanswered questions, never clarifying how Jessie fares in probate court, whether Teena’s proposed case settlement goes through, what happens to the lakebed dike, and how Bud/Bobby is finally dealt with.