Here is a late-spring meal to evoke deep summer, when the heat lies heavy even at dusk and humidity wraps you like a blanket: shrimp tossed in garlic butter made fiery with Indonesian sambal and jalapeño, cut by lime, fragrant with cilantro.

It is a kind of scampi for the sun-kissed and sun-desirous alike, a vacation on a plate. Add a mojito and a couple of beers.

The dish comes out of southwest Florida, out of Doc Ford’s Sanibel Rum Bar and Grille, a restaurant that sits off the road that runs slow and sultry along Sanibel Island toward Captiva, past the placid, russet waters of Tarpon Bay. Randy Wayne White, one of the owners, named the place after the fictional protagonist of his mystery novels. The air smells of salt and mangrove there, of tropical rot and fresh-cut grass.

Doc Ford is a former government agent, the sort with a lot of Special Operations work in his past, dark memories and lethal skills. He is a marine biologist on Sanibel now, and longs for the quiet, contemplative life of a scientist. That isn’t going to happen. Since 1990, over the course of 17 best-selling books, there has been no end of trouble. Along with his hippie pal, Tomlinson, who bears some resemblance to the former Red Sox pitcher and mystic Bill Lee, a friend of White’s, Doc Ford has solved crimes up and down the coast of Florida. His latest adventure, “Deep Shadow,” which largely takes place in an underwater cave and involves both vicious criminals and a scary swamp creature, came out at the beginning of March.