Dismal, Florida Books in Order

The Dismal, Florida series takes Dawn Lee McKenna’s love of small Southern towns and moves it into the early 1970s. The setting is not the tourist Florida of beaches and postcards. It is a tense, humid, closely watched town where old loyalties, old lies, and racial violence still shape daily life.

The first book, Black and White, opens in July 1973. The details matter: AM radio, Secretariat’s Triple Crown, local gas stations, old grudges, and the social rules people think they can keep enforcing forever. McKenna uses those period touches to ground the story, not to turn it into nostalgia. The past is warm in places, but it is also dangerous.

Jennifer Sheehan comes home to Dismal to reclaim a life that violence took from her. Eleven years earlier, a racially charged attack changed her group of high-school friends. Soon after, her mother, a Civil Rights activist, was murdered. The crimes were linked in the minds of the police, but never solved in any way that gave Jennifer peace.

Now Jennifer is back as Dismal’s first female police officer. That alone would be enough to make people stare, whisper, and test her patience. But she is also asking questions that some people need left alone. Her return pulls her back toward the best friend who was hurt, the boyfriend she left behind, and the truth her hometown has been dodging for more than a decade.

Dismal is not just a name.

The series blends romantic suspense, mystery, and social tension. It is clean in the sense that McKenna’s books usually are, without leaning on graphic content, but it is not soft. The danger comes from buried racism, family damage, fear, and the way a town can protect itself by pretending not to know what everyone knows.

For readers coming from Forgotten Coast or Still Waters, this series feels related but different. The humor is still dry, the characters still talk like people with long memories, and the setting still does heavy lifting. But Black and White is more openly about history, who gets believed, who gets protected, and what it costs to come home when the people who hurt you are still close enough to wave from across the street.