Florida gothic noir a wild ride

“Holding Smoke” opens with two men coming out of darkness into something like light.

A man known as Brother Felton walks out of a swamp, his head full of fevered visions of a great snake and “the endless rasping of its bone-white scales,” into the camp of a trio of wandering teenage petty thieves, who goodheartedly take him in.

Judah Cannon walks out of a cell for the second time in his life, thanks to his fierce girlfriend Ramey’s payoffs to the skeevy local sheriff and state attorney, and right back into his family’s business: crime. Judah has his own visions, of flight with Ramey from his hometown of Silas and his brutal family.

“Holding Smoke,” a pedal-tothe-metal tale of Southern gothic noir, is Steph Post’s fifth novel and the third in her trilogy about Judah, after “Lightwood” and “Walk in the Fire.”

With “Holding Smoke” she returns to the north central Florida turf of the Cannons, rural territory dotted with hard-luck small towns where the only thing scarier than the drug dealers and the biker gangs is the psychopathic Pentecostal preacher whose church elders, four “ancient, identical men” who speak only in Scripture, do her bidding even when it’s fatal.

Judah has only been in jail a couple of months, but he finds he has several conflicts to clear up with other criminals, thanks to his belligerent brother Levi. The two keep clashing over how to run their business.

The Cannons and their crew soon get drawn into a scheme proposed by a mysterious woman named Dinah, who wants their help to kidnap a hugely valuable Thoroughbred stallion from an Ocala ranch.

In the meantime, Felton is planning his approach to that fearsome preacher, Sister Tulah, who also happens to be his aunt. Tulah is dealing with some blowback on a scam she’s been running, in the time-honored Florida tradition of selling swampland for development. She’s going to be in a pretty nasty mood when Felton comes home with a new attitude, and her nasty moods can get people killed.

Felton’s and Judah’s story lines seem unrelated, but Post deftly twists them together. Judah and Sister Tulah have only met once before, and then she was, to him, “the old woman in the background.” She won’t be this time. Post keeps the reader guessing who, if anyone, will come out of this wild ride alive.