Word: palmful
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...Tall Man (Penguin; 276 pages) - Hooper's follow-up to the successful novel A Child's Book of True Crime - begins with the death of 36-year-old Cameron Doomadgee, a member of the 2,500-strong Aboriginal community on Queensland's Palm Island. On Nov. 19, 2004, Doomadgee was arrested for allegedly swearing at police officers. Some 40 minutes later, he lay dead in a cell with a black eye, bruising to his head, body and hands, four broken ribs, a ruptured portal vein and a split liver. The only suspect was Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, whom Queensland...
...wholly likable victim and Hurley as a thug. Always, however, she favors nuance over cliché, context over judgment. The book's title is partly a reference to Hurley, a 2-m-tall career cop who had been decorated for bravery and eschewed comfortable postings for trouble spots like Palm Island, a former open-air Aboriginal jail where "the heat attacks like a swarm of insects," writes Hooper, and "booze and loathing" fill the stifling air. Hurley, she acknowledges, was impressive on the stand: "He seemed grave. He seemed sincere. He really could have been an old screen idol...
...While absorbed in the black and white of guilt or innocence, Hooper is also drawn to the gray. Conscious of being a middle-class author residing in a cosmopolitan city, she doesn't pretend to know much about the realities of law enforcement on an eerie powder keg like Palm Island. Must notions of good and evil, she wonders, necessarily blur in such a dysfunctional, desperate place? In a community of extreme violence, are those charged with keeping order forced to be violent...
Still, the winters really are great! And this doom-and-glooming might sound familiar. In 1981, TIME declared crime- and drug-plagued South Florida a "Paradise Lost." The region then embarked on an epic boom. Southeast Florida - including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach - ballooned into the nation's seventh largest metro, while southwest Florida - Naples, Cape Coral, Fort Myers - became the fastest-growing metro. Last year 82.4 million visitors found their way to this lost paradise. And last month Governor Charlie Crist unveiled a $1.75 billion deal to buy the U.S. Sugar Corp. and its 187,000 acres...
...defends fraud cases. "It's where the action is," he explains with a grin. An epidemic of inflated appraisals, exaggerated incomes, straw buyers - and the lax regulation to enable it all - has made Florida tops in mortgage fraud, according to the Mortgage Asset Research Institute; in a recent Palm Beach County case, a grocery cashier's salary was listed as $344,000 a year. And Paul Singerman, bankruptcy counsel for Puig's companies, is even busier. His firm represents the Florida home builders Tousa Inc. and Levitt and Sons, which happen to be the nation's two largest bankrupt home...