Sex on the Beach: Scandal in the 'Handle

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JOHN WALLACE, a young pastor in the Florida panhandle, has had a rough day. To sooth his ruffled feathers, his girlfriend walks him along the beach to enjoy its beauty. At a secluded spot they stop and have sex. So far, so good. Unfortunately, a deputy sheriff is nearby, hears them, sees them, and arrests them, setting off a scandal that all of Notlaw County is going to be talking about.
BUCK MOORE is a federal public defender who does not like the heavy workload and stress of major cases, so he works “shit cases”, literally cases where errant dogs out for a walk leave their excrement on the federal courthouse lawn. Federal property, federal case. Buck is comfortable in his niche. He does not want to leave his comfort zone in Tallahassee and go out into the Florida panhandle on a case he’s been assigned concerning “beach fortification”. He knows nothing about beach fortification. He is going to have to actually learn the law. This is going to be arduous.
Fortunately, Buck has a protector in Chief Judge Chief WINDIN FEATHER. The Chief owes Buck for a favor Buck’s father did the Chief. As a full-blooded Seminole Indian, Windin Feather was selected to be Osceola at the university football game. He strode out on the horse Renegade to the fifty yard line, raised his burning spear high in the air, the fans howled with delight, Windin Feather chucked his spear towards the ground, and suddenly the entire marching band collapsed like dominoes onto the field. Windin Feather had missed his mark. The spear had ended up in the back thigh of a now prone, corpulent tuba player. Windin Feather had to flee Tallahassee. Over time Buck’s father, a prominent lawyer and college friend of Windin Feather, secured a minor federal judgeship for him in the outback of Florida. From there Windin Feather made his comeback to be a chief judge in a high federal court, and from that pinnacle he is committed to look after the welfare of Buck.
Buck arrives at the beaches of Notlaw County and begins researching beach fortifications by visiting those who build them. One builder is BO HUTCHENS, a county commissioner who is also a real estate developer. Buck finds Bo in front of an elementary school. Bo is blocking the entrance to the school in protest because the entrance cuts across Bo’s property, which he wants to develop. After school, the blocked entrance forces kids to march across the school yard to their parents’ SUVs and trucks waiting on the street. Many succumb to the upside of the intervening drainage ditch by falling backward under the weight of their backpacks, which keep them pinned and wiggling like turtles until their parents retrieve them. Bo is too harried to talk much with Buck; Bo soon disappears.

To find more builders, Buck attends a prayer vigil of real estate developers who pray, sermonize, and sprinkle holy water on the model of a development to summon divine intervention in the collapsing real estate market. By chance at the vigil, Buck encounters John Wallace, the pastor his client. They head for a restaurant to talk, but find that it, like many others, has burned down. The restaurant sat on property that could make much more money as a condominium than as a restaurant. At another restaurant still standing, “Dicks” , Buck and John Wallace talk. Buck finds out that his case is beach fornication, not beach fortification. Buck smacks himself in the head.

While Buck has been making his way around Notlaw County, he has had to rely on BONNIE to give him directions. Bonnie is the beautiful, but abused, American wife of MAHMOUD KHOMEINI, an Iranian who thinks he is Persian and who operates the Dunes of Darius where Buck is staying. Buck grows to like Bonnie, the more the more he sees of her, literally when she reveals herself in a bathing suit.