cover image My Own Worst Enemy

My Own Worst Enemy

Brandon Hebert, . . Five Star, $25.95 (233pp) ISBN 978-1-59414-827-9

At the start of Hebert's less than convincing debut, two Coral Gables, Fla., police officers nab burglar Jack Murray outside the house he's just broken into while his partner, Rudy Naxa, escapes with the loot. After serving a year and a day in prison, Murray decides to get out of the game. Murray's patron, a Miami mob boss, makes him the manager of a strip club, which is ostensibly on the up-and-up. Soon, Murray finds himself falling for a new employee of the club, Miranda Mendoza, a 26-year-old pole dancer who's in fact an undercover FBI agent. Later, after Murray runs across Naxa and winds up on the enemies' list of the thugs who have taken Naxa under their wing, he has to struggle to stay on the straight and narrow. That Mendoza is attracted to Murray, despite his past on the wrong side of the law, is as implausible as her revealing her true role to people she barely knows. (Dec.)