Miami Blues - Softcover

Willeford, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400032466 ISBN 13: 9781400032464

Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2004

Synopsis

After a brutal day investigating a quadruple homicide, Detective Hoke Moseley settles into his room at the un-illustrious El Dorado Hotel and nurses a glass of brandy. With his guard down, he doesn’t think twice when he hears a knock on the door. The next day, he finds himself in the hospital, badly bruised and with his jaw wired shut. He thinks back over ten years of cases wondering who would want to beat him into unconsciousness, steal his gun and badge, and most importantly, make off with his prized dentures. But the pieces never quite add up to revenge, and the few clues he has keep connecting to a dimwitted hooker, and her ex-con boyfriend and the bizarre murder of a Hare Krishna pimp.

Chronically depressed, constantly strapped for money, always willing to bend the rules a bit, Hoke Moseley is hardly what you think of as the perfect cop, but he is one of the the greatest detective creations of all time.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"If you are looking for a master's insight into the humid decandence of South Florida and its polyglot tribes, nobody does that as well as Mr. Willeford."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Harrowing and surprising."
--Publishers Weekly

"The best book on the mystery racks these days [is] Charles Willeford's Miami Blues."
--The Village Voice

From the Inside Flap:

Beware of the cop.  He bites.

Hoke Moseley never saw him coming: the person who crashed into his squalid little hidey-hole in the Eldorado Hotel.  When his assailant was was done, Hoke's pride and joy, his dentures, were gone.  So were his gun and his badge.

Recovering from the brutal beating, Hoke tried to figure out who had administered it. The one place he didn't look was at a pair of ill-suited lovers: an ex-con from California and a simpleminded whore was was studying business management at Miami-Dade college.

What the two had in common was a demented interest in haiku, a Hare Krishna who died of a broken finger at a Miami airport, and the acquaintance of a cop without any teeth: the very cop who, as soon as he remembers, will hunt them down.  All the way down.
From the Paperback edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1400032466
• ISBN 13: 9781400032464
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208