Battling killers and cheats in Miami

Nick Stone gives us plenty of action and an authentic vision of South Florida in the days of cocaine cowboys and riots.
BY OLINE H. COGDILL

THE KING OF SWORDS. Nick Stone. Harper. 576 pages. $24.95

The Miami of the early 1980s has become an almost mythical place, an era steeped in the lore of Miami Vice and Scarface and seen as the epicenter for drugs and the glamour of a new South Beach. Nick Stone captures that reality in his gritty, brutal and expertly plotted The King of Swords, offering an authentic vision of South Florida along with plenty of hard-boiled action.

A few scenes of bizarre South Florida behavior crop up, but Stone uses them not for comic effect but to emphasize a society on the cusp of change. The King of Swords works equally as a police procedural, a thriller and an examination of multidimensional characters.

Stone's second novel is a prequel to the superb Mr. Clarinet,'' released in the United States last year after it had debuted in England. There Stone introduced Max Mingus, whose search for the son of a wealthy white Haitian family led him to his old nemesis -- Solomon Boukman, a drug baron with a far-reaching influence.

The King of Swords shows where the story began for Max, a detective sergeant on the elite Miami Task Force. The book is set in late 1980, wrapping up one of Miami's most tumultuous years that included the Mariel boatlift and the riots following the trial of the cops involved in the Arthur McDuffie beating. An influx of cocaine has given Miami an ``off-the-chart-and-still rising homicide epidemic.''

Max and his partner detective Joe Liston are called to the scene of a bizarre death in a primate park in Miami. But this isn't just one of those only-in-Florida crimes: The victim's entire family also has been killed, and the King of Swords tarot card is found in the man's body.

As 1980 folds into 1981, Max and Joe uncover a link to Boukman, a ruthless drug lord whose voudou practices that include human sacrifice have become legendary. Many fear him, but few people have seen his face, ``an ambiguous silhouette in the feeble light.''

Click here to read the entire review.

'Street Gang' by Michael Davis

By Diana Wagman (LA TIMES)

Big Bird snorts cocaine. Mr. Hooper uses his store as a front for stolen goods. Oscar the Grouch keeps pornography in his trash can.

If these are the stories you are looking for, too bad. "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street" is not a Hollywood tell-all. No puppeteer hung himself by his own strings; Cookie Monster was not discovered on a casting couch. It is not even set in Hollywood. "Sesame Street" was inspired, imagined, sold and created out of the civil rights movement in New York City. And seemingly everyone involved with it was as altruistic and munificent as the theme song:


On my way

to where the air is sweet.

Can you tell me how to get,

how to get to Sesame Street?

Yes, we get a little past-tense womanizing, a lot of drinking and a psychotic breakdown later in the book, but it all seems sad, not salacious, and not germane to the basic story. "Street Gang" is journalist Michael Davis' tale of a woman, Joan Ganz Cooney, who had an idea at a dinner party and, despite plenty of opposition, fought her way to creating a show for preschoolers that would change television as we know it.

To read the rest of Diana Wagman's review of "Street Gang" by Michael Davis please click here.

A Thrilling Ride In Castro Plot

By Chuck Leddy

In his 11th book, "Fidel's Last Days," local author Roland Merullo has penned a fast-paced and highly satisfying spy thriller about a conspiracy to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro. Merullo seamlessly switches the action from Miami, where a secret organization of Cuban expatriates is plotting to kill Castro, to Havana, where we see Castro's dictatorship in action and watch an internal assassination plot develop among Castro's own advisers. These two plots (and the separate narrative strains) come together at book's end in a dramatic climax that may turn out to be anti-climactic after all.

Merullo has created a number of strong, well-developed characters, including Cuban-born Carolina Perez, a former CIA agent who now works for a secret anti-Castro organization; Carlos Gutierrez, Cuba's minister of health who has become disillusioned with Castro's leadership and decides to kill him; and Castro himself, a suspicious, egomaniacal strongman who rightfully sees potential betrayal all around him (of Castro, Merullo writes, "Any tiny deviation from the posture of adoration was a personal insult"). Merullo has mastered and incorporated into his solid narrative structure the conventions of the spy thriller in order to build tension, create mystery, and move the story forward at an impressively breakneck pace.

The book's most memorable character, a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Vlad the Impaler, is the head of Cuba's vicious secret police, Felix Olochon. Olochon had built his blood-soaked career as the official torturer and executioner of Castro's Orwellian police state. "There was nothing [he] would not do, nothing," writes Merullo, "He was not bound by the thinnest filament of moral compunction." The scenes between Olochon and the plotter Gutierrez, as Olochon attempts to uncover the assassination plot and Gutierrez tries to hide it, are mesmerizing.

To Read more of Chuck Leddy's review of "Fidel's Last Days" please click here.

Cataloging the Insults (and Joys) of Old Age

One of the drawbacks of old age, the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s final novel, “Ravelstein” (2000), declares, is that gaps begin to open in your life, “and these gaps tend to fill up with your dead.”
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Jillian Edelstein

One of the many excellent things about Diana Athill’s previous memoir, “Stet” (2000), about her long and storied career as a book editor in London — she worked with V. S. Naipaul, John Updike and Norman Mailer, among others — was that she allowed the gaps in her story to fill, like frosting layered onto a cake, with fulsome memories of her own cherished dead.

Some of the writers she celebrated in her witty, cantankerous style are all but forgotten now. Does anyone read the Irish novelist Molly Keane or the Brooklyn-born experimental writer Alfred Chester any longer?

To read more of Dwight Garner's Review from the New York Times click here.