Brightwing by Sullivan Lee

Edgar Battle is not having a good day.  Following a prison bus break, he and his brother, Mallory are on the run.  The problem is that Mallory is a sociopath and the body toll keeps rising.  Now the biggest manhunt in Florida for many years has the brothers right in its headlights.  They need to change cars and they need to do it now.

Coming up on a woman with a stranded car on a backroad, they quickly take her hostage.  Nothing they haven't done before, but this time things don't go as planned.  They have kidnapped Lucy Brightwing.  Lucy is the sole survivor of the Tequesta Indian tribe.  She is in the process of buying enough land to create her own reservation, but that kind of dream takes lots of money.  Lucy is on her way home from a jewelry heist and has millions of dollars worth of jewels hidden in her car.  She decides that the easiest thing to do is to take these two men to her home deep in the swamps where she will have the upper hand.

Lucy is right.  The Battle brothers stomp around the swamp like a bull in a china shop, totally out of their element.  Lucy quickly loses her fear of them and starts to teach Edgar how to survive using the old Indian techniques.  In the meantime, the unthinkable happens.  Captor and captive become lovers and both realise that they have found what they have been searching for their entire lives.

But life doesn't just let dreams come true, especially when lots of laws have been broken.  Can Lucy and Edgar figure out a way to be together without worrying about the long arm of the law?

Sullivan Lee has written a quirky crime novel with engaging characters.  Against all odds, readers start to have sympathy for Lucy and Edgar, and by the end of the book are hoping they can find a way to live their dreams.  Along the way, the reader learns about the Everglades ecosystem, and the techniques the Indians used to survive in this hostile environment.  This book is recommended for suspense readers.