Silent City

Segura's debut novel uses many familiar elements of detective fiction but fails to combine them in a way likely to please the genre's fans. Newspaperman Pete Fernandez's once promising career as an investigative sports reporter has stalled, and he's now a copy editor for the Miami Times. The love of his life, Emily Blanco, his former fianc%C3%A9e, has given up on him and married someone else. The paper's elderly news columnist, Chaz Bentley, somewhat surprisingly asks Fernandez to help find his daughter, Kathy Bentley, one of the paper's investigative reporters, who's missing. Kathy was involved with one of Fernandez's childhood friends, Javier Reyes. Fernandez, frequently either drunk or hung over, manages to discover that Kathy was working on a story about the infamous hit man dubbed "the Silent Death," the same killer Fernandez's cop father had failed to solve before his death. A weak plot, one-dimensional characters, and the improbably difficulties a highly skilled assassin has simply blowing away Fernandez mark this as an apprentice work. Hopefully, Segura will do better next time. (Oct.)