Book review: ‘Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades,’ by Rebecca Renner

It takes a cool eye to look at all sides of a situation when you have skin in the game. Nature writer (and erstwhile Orlando Weekly contributor) Rebecca Renner grew up in, and passionately loves, Florida's wildly varied ecology — its "temperate forests, savannas, grasslands, marshes and swamps, pineland scrub and hardwood hammocks, estuaries, rivers, beaches, and springs."

But to write about both the poachers and the cops who stop them with equal grace and justice isn't easy. Renner chronicles both wildlife poachers (a time-honored subsistence tactic) and agents of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who work to stop them, zeroing in on an undercover agent running a sting operation: Operation Alligator Thief.

Certainly Gator Country owes a debt to Susan Orleans' milestone The Orchid Thief, swapping flowers for reptiles, but it also harkens to crime nonfiction, like Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg's I Got a Monster — scrupulously reported but narratively tense, dispassionately depicting the actions of "the good guys" and "the bad guys" without taking sides.

Renner is a natural storyteller, and she does service to wild Florida, igniting an answering passion in the reader.