Torrid Zone is a magical and steamy collection of tales from the swamps and bayous of the deepest South - the American Gulf Coast. In his first work of fiction, naturalist and travel writer Jonathan Maslow takes readers on a riotous tour of human geography in the land of Mardi Gras and pirates' treasure. Meet Cesar Fuentes, last of the Tampa cigar-factory lectors, the readers who turned the toilsome job of hand-rolling cigars into a dangerous political education.

No better than she needs to be, Weekee Wachee's "live mermaid," Stevie Rae, tells her hard-luck story in a Gulf Coast blues bar at 3:00 A.M. Captain Babba, a one-legged Vietnam vet, spends his days ferrying tourists to see the whooping cranes of the Texas Gulf Coast until, one day, a Vietnamese tour group shows him a part of the coast no one alive has ever seen.

And Estavanico, a saucy African slave, chronicles the travails of a sixteenth-century expedition to the New World gone wrong, playing Sancho Panza to his Conquistador's Don Quixote.