When the Orchards Wept
Florida's citrus country has been dying by inches for twenty years, and nowhere does that slow, aching loss feel more haunted than the groves west of Loxahatchee, where the Whitfield family has worked the same rows for three generations. When migrant worker Jimmy Jones vanishes from the Whitfield grove the same night he witnesses something being buried beneath the trees, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Deputies Samuel “Sam” Rourke and Jake Masters are pulled back to a cartel they thought they had already broken, one that never actually let go.
What begins as a missing person's case quickly becomes something the pickers who work these rows have quietly known for years. Trees that show no sign of disease bleed sap that never should exist. Ground disturbed once seems to keep disturbing itself. And a community with every reason to distrust a badge speaks about the grove the only way it knows how, as something that remembers far more than it should.
As Rourke and Jake dig into who actually owns and runs the Whitfield operation, they uncover a family business that should have folded to citrus greening disease years ago and somehow never did, kept alive instead by a quiet arrangement with the same cartel organization Rourke first broke apart on the other side of the county. Beneath the trees lies more than one body, and every answer the investigation turns up only widens the list of who has been paid to look away.
Jimmy's sister Sandy refuses to accept the vague answers she is given, and her search becomes the one thing capable of cracking open a community too frightened to talk to anyone else. But the closer she and Rourke get to the truth buried in the Whitfield grove, the more the grove itself seems determined to keep it, and by the time the last body is found, not everyone investigating will be able to explain, or survive, exactly what these rows have been made to hold.
When the Orchards Wept is the fifth and final book in Howard Mark Hines' Blood in the Palms series, a South Florida mystery of buried secrets, dying land, and a debt this county has been quietly paying for far longer than anyone realized, one the series' final case finally forces into the light.
