cover image Straits of Fortune

Straits of Fortune

Anthony Gagliano, . . Morrow, $23.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-06-087809-2

Gagliano's debut crackles with the same energy that characterized Robert Crais's early Elvis Cole novels. Jack Vaughn, a disgraced New York City cop, has moved to Miami and become a personal trainer—"a gym rat for hire." Retired colonel Andrew Patterson, owner of Pellucid Labs and a former exercise client, offers Jack $100K for an unusual job: sinking the yacht that's parked a couple of hundred yards offshore behind the colonel's beach house, along with a dead man on board. Complicating Jack's decision is the fact that the colonel's daughter, Vivian, happens to be Jack's former lover, who left him for pornographer Randy Matson, the dead man on the boat. Jack resists the job for a while, but eventually climbs aboard, at which point very bad things start to happen. Gagliano's Miami is a jittery mix of beautiful women, handsome bad boys, thugs, smugglers and weird eccentrics, all of whom the author draws with panache. With Jack Vaughn's first outing, Gagliano makes an auspicious beginning on a promising new series. (June)