I had moved to Wewa after living in New York City and Miami, both cities where I worked as a journalist, the doomed profession of our times. When the doom caught up with me, and being of retirement age, I figured it was time to retreat from worldly noise and finally try my hand at what Michael Lister was doing at a much younger age and with great success: writing books. My sister had married a local man and lived in his family property outside Wewa, a small ranch where they raised horses and chickens. My aging parents had moved right next door, into a double-wide trailer the size of a comfortable suburban home, and my father had died there. I lived with my mom the last two years of her life and now the double-wide—common housing in these parts—was my home.

The Florida Panhandle is the Deep South, as Lister himself has made clear, unlike South Florida, where one is hard pressed to hear a Southern accent. “The best fiction is regional, is geographically specific,” Lister has said, calling himself “one of those novelists” of the romantic and misery-ridden South. Like the scent of honeysuckle in The Sound and the Fury, the heady perfume of the region haunts, underpinned by an extroverted religiosity—so different from the tight Protestantism of the old North—and a painful history. This is a zone where crime could be rightfully called sin, where a chaplain, a prison official whose job is to redeem rather than punish, is the right kind of hero.

John Jordan enters the world witnessing a killing, and then, in a grotesque bit of slapstick, falling into the victim and soaking up his blood. But he's cool. The chaplain takes his role seriously and takes control of the situation. He is, after all, a man of God. And he's also a detective, solving, as they all must, crimes—which is to say, riddles. Mysteries. And mysteries are what crime fiction and religion are both all about. Except that in one, what matters is to eliminate the mysteries and let the light shine through, while in the other the light shines through when there's faith in the mysteries. A detective/chaplain, who else could manage both?

At the core of the John Jordan mysteries is the region itself. This Deep South in North Florida. There is mystery here. The woods are thick with undergrowth. Trek for a while and they become wetlands. If Florida’s most famous wetland, the Everglades, is a flat and endless savanna of sawgrass, the swamps here are bayous, just as wet but denser. And there's none of the genteel South of lore. No antebellum mansions until you're practically in Georgia. Instead, the improvised life of double-wide trailers and riverboats. Suburban ranch houses. Beach houses on stilts. Cottages from an Old Florida that has not yet fully succumbed to development.