Excerpt – The Long Way by L.B. Phillips
Synopsis
Some places are worth the long way around.
Miles Donovan notices things. It’s a harmless habit — until a stranger presses a fifteen-year-old postcard into his hand and points him toward the vanishing Florida the rest of the world keeps paving over: the fish camps and tiki bars, the hand-painted motels and one-of-a-kind roadside wonders that a faceless corporation called Meridian is quietly erasing, one beloved landmark at a time.
Armed with a faded gray cap, a road-worn Jeep, and a crew of the gloriously stubborn, Miles sets out to save what’s left — and discovers that the map he’s really following leads straight back to the people and places that made him.
Warm, funny, and big-hearted, The Long Way is a Gulf Coast road-trip mystery in the affectionate, only-in-Florida spirit of Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey — a real mystery at its heart, with a soul and a sense of humor. Book One of The Department of Small Wonders.
Amazon
This book releases on September 1, 2026. Preorder today!
Excerpt
Perdido Key, Florida — 5:58 a.m.
The sign had said MO’S SHELL SHACK — SINCE 1961 — YOU BUY, WE FRY for sixty-two years, which was sixty-two more years than anyone from Meridian had been alive — a fact that troubled precisely no one in the three identical gray SUVs now idling on its oyster-shell lot, engines running, headlights off, in that colorless hour when the Gulf hasn’t yet decided whether to be silver or nothing at all.
A young man named Kyler climbed out with a clipboard, a lanyard, and the untroubled conscience of a person who has completed the online compliance module and scored, as he would tell you if you gave him the opening, a ninety-four. His title was Regional Associate Director of Experience Resolution — a job that had required no prior experience and would, this morning, resolve one. He checked the address against his tablet. The tablet was very confident. The tablet was always very confident; it was the single most confident object in the state of Florida, and it had never once been to Florida.
Behind him, without malice and without ceremony — the way you’d close a laptop you were finished with — a low-loader lowered its ramp, and a machine the color of a wasp rolled off it and settled into an idle, patient as weather.
Mo had been dead four years. His daughter had kept the place open anyway, on a species of arithmetic you refuse to do out loud. She came out onto the porch of the only building her father had ever loved, wearing a bathrobe and holding a spatula, as if a spatula were a thing a person could hold up against a machine, and she said the sentence they always said, the one Kyler had been trained to wait out the way you wait out weather:
“You can’t. People love this place.”
Kyler smiled. There was a module for the smile. And he delivered the line Meridian had paid a consultancy nine million dollars to make sound like kindness.
“They’ll love whatever we put here more, ma’am. That’s the whole idea.” He clicked his pen. “There’s no friction in forgetting.”
The wasp-colored machine leaned into the porch.
And the sign that had told the same small true thing since 1961 came down in about the time it takes to change your mind about a person you were sure you knew — and by the time the sun cleared the water there was nothing there at all. No shack. No smell of the fryer. No daughter, who had gone to sit in her car and would sit there a long while. Only a flat, clean, graded, optimized rectangle of America, silent and waiting, ready to become anywhere.
Four hundred miles south, at that precise minute, a rooster stepped into an intersection and stopped traffic, and a man in a faded gray cap smiled, because he had just noticed something.
He noticed things.
It was, as it would turn out, the single most dangerous habit in America.
About the Author
L.B. Phillips is a Florida-born writer who grew up on the Gulf side, around Pinellas County, and came to fiction by way of newspapers — he was Publisher and Editor of The Pinellas Informer. He writes warm, funny, character-driven stories about the disappearing, one-of-a-kind places worth saving. The Long Way is his debut novel and the first book in the Department of Small Wonders series. He now lives in Knoxville, Tennessee — close enough to the Smokies to hike, and far enough from the Gulf to miss it.
