This is part II of the Max Freeman saga that began with King's Edgar Award winner for best new mystery, Blue Edge of MidnightYou will remember that Max is a former Philly beat cop who ran away to the Everglades after killing a 12yo in the midst of committing an armed robbery.
Three main players here: Frank McCane is an insurance investigator who used to be THE go-to guard for contraband in a Georgia prison. Eddie Baines is a mostly mentally incompetent small time crook in an NFL lineman's body with a taste for hookers and heroin. Dr. Harold Marshak was the prison psychiatrist who treated Eddie.
Old, mostly black, women, some of whom were among the first black entrepreneurs of South Florida, are dying. Well, they were dying anyway, but some think they are dying off a bit too quickly.
The common link is each had just sold their life insurance policy as a viatical (I had to look it up, so I linked Wikipedia) where the holder gets cash (below the policy's maturity amount) and the investors collect the full amount once the holder dies. The longer the holder lives, the longer the investors have to wait to cash out. And these ladies are dying awfully soon after selling the policy. Freeman's lawyer buddy Billy is getting no love from Miami PD about the deaths (that all seem to look to be due to natural causes) and thinks maybe Max might be a good choice to do a little digging.
And dig he does. Slowly, he learns about the women and enlists the help of a group of locals who protect the off-limits area; a drug-free zone consisting mostly of these older women and turn out to be valuable assets in his crawling though the Miami underbelly.
To make a short (but very interesting) story brief, Max (and an equally scarred female Miami PD Detective from book #1) put the pieces together to learn that a group of investors get McCane to look over insurance policies to find who might be receptive to a viatical. Once the deal is sealed, McCane tells the doc who then pays Eddie to send the holder off to the next life through suffocation. Eddie then uses his cash for drugs and maybe a hooker.
Short description of a short, and a very clever book. I was trying to think of who King reminded me of. Then I looked on his website and saw some comparisons with James Lee Burke . . . yeah, that's a good comparison. Call it swamp noir. But it can't really be noir, cuz according to MRB friend Charlie Stella's 10 rules of noir, it fails on two fronts. Rule #4 says that the femme fatale needs to be a nasty broad. She isn't. Actually, she's kind of cool. Also, rule #8 doesn't occur; too bad.
In coming books, it looks like Max becomes a Miami PI. Should be a fun series. Maybe rule #8 might surface after all. I'm hopeful.
East Coast Don
ECD, nice review. I just finished this, my second Jonathon King novel, and I liked it as much as the first. The characters are really growing on me, gaining depth - good stories, and I've already downloaded the next one in the series, Shadow Men. King has captured me, and I'll keep reading.
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