When Mangrove Bayou mayor Lester Groud finds an amputated hand in the Florida coastal mangroves, multi-ethnic, northern-born Chief Troy Adams tries to find the owner. Instead, he stumbles into a cocaine-smuggling operation gone bad, and some very annoyed drug trafficers.Add in a loner teenager with a gun, a feral child in a house filled with cockroaches, a whorehouse with standards and a mailing list, and a salesman with machineguns and tanks to sell, and Troy and his officers are having a busy few days. Life is never dull in Mangrove Bayou.