Set on the Florida coast, in the small fishing town of Sanavere, Familiar Heat spans a few years in the lives of an assortment of characters, each precisely and vividly imagined - hardworking shrimpers, net menders, and fishermen; priests; shopkeepers; and a vibrant community of Cuban exiles still reliving - after thirty years - the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Against this background, we follow several interconnected marriages in various kinds of trouble.

At the center is the marriage of Faye Parry, a beguiling young woman, and Vic Rios, captain of a Cuban charter boat and reformed rake ("that devil in a blue shirt," Faye's mother calls him). As the novel opens, Faye is on the way into the bank when she interrupts a robbery in progress and is taken hostage.

What happens to her is brutal enough ("There is no fate worse than death," Faye assures herself during the ordeal), but it leads to a series of even more traumatic events, culminating in an accident that leaves her without memory of who she is. When her husband reverts to his old rakish ways, their estrangement seems irreversible: a man who wishes to forget he was ever married and a woman who hasn't a clue.

If the town were not such a small one, if Mary Hood were not such a magical writer, that might be the end of it...