The Last Train to Key West (The Perez Family, #3)

by Chanel Cleeton

Life happens whether you’re worrying about it or not, and it seems presumptuous to think we have much of a say in how things play out.

People are a mystery, and the second you think you have them figured out, they surprise you.

“It’s hard to know what you’d like when so many doors are closed to you.”

Maybe that’s the problem; there’s a double-edged sword to beauty and all the interest—good and bad—it attracts.

Who really knows what goes on in a marriage besides the people inside it?”

Fate is a capricious thing; there’s no accounting for whom it affects. One family is spared, while the next is utterly decimated.”

You can live a fair share of adventures in other people’s stories.

Sometimes I can’t understand the way this world works, why good people like Alice are taken while others are saved in spite of their wicked ways.

1935 Labor Day hurricane, one of the strongest and deadliest storms to strike the United States. It wasn’t the hurricane itself that caught my eye, though; it was the story of World War I veterans who had been sent down to work on the highway and whose lives were tragically lost. The more I researched the story, the more it called to me, and I soon began to envision the women who would populate the book and how their lives would intersect. In my research, Storm of the Century by Willie Drye, Category 5: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane by Thomas Neil Knowles, Hemingway’s Hurricane: The Great Florida Keys Storm of 1935 by Phil Scott, and Last Train to Paradise by Les Standiford were all invaluable resources, and I highly recommend them if you’d like to learn more about the Labor Day hurricane. The hurricane of 1935 that struck the Florida Keys is one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes in history. While the death toll is disputed, numbers range between approximately four

More than a third of the veterans who were living on Windley and Matecumbe Keys were killed by the storm, and it is generally accepted that more than half of the residents and workers caught in the hurricane lost their lives.