Tropical Depression

Laurence Shames was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1951, and graduated summa cum laude from NYU, in 1972. He became a journalist, and was published in magazines such as Playboy, Outside, Saturday Review, and Vanity Fair. In 1982, he was named Ethics columnist of Esquire, and also made a contributing editor.

In 1991, Shames co- wrote a national non-fiction best-seller on the Mafia called Boss of Bosses, with two FBI agents. This success afforded him the opportunity to write fiction full-time, and he has since written ten Key West comic thrillers. He won the CWA Last Laugh Dagger Award for the funniest crime novel of 1995 with Sunburn.

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