In the Heat - Hardcover

Vasquez, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312378092 ISBN 13: 9780312378097

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2008

Synopsis

Boxer Miles Young thinks he’s got one more shot in him before it’s time to hang up the gloves for good. He may be the only one who thinks so. The truth is, he enjoys the recognition his career has brought him at home, in the small Latin American country of Belize, and he’s worried about how he’ll support his daughter once it’s over. So when his promoter comes to him with a proposition that includes one last big fight, he listens.

Isabelle Gilmore wants Miles to find her daughter, who’s run off with some of her mother’s money and her no-good boyfriend. Isabelle’s afraid Rian’s going to marry the kid, the only son of corrupt ex--police chief Marlon Tablada, and she wants Rian---and the money---found. In return, Miles gets put on a fight card with a $30,000 payday.

He’s reluctant, but Isabelle thinks a hometown hero can get people to talk in ways a private investigator can’t. Trouble is, before he can find Rian, he learns that there’s much more to Isabelle, her daughter, and Marlon than Isabelle let on.

Clearly at home in the world of hardboiled crime writing, debut novelist Ian Vasquez is a bright new talent who infuses In the Heat with a steamy, exotic voice all his own.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Vasquez, an avid boxing fan and a copy editor at the St. Petersburg Times, received his MFA while working on a psychiatric ward and counseling at-risk high school students. Raised in Belize, he lives near Tampa Bay, Florida, with his family. This is his first novel.

Reviews

At the start of Vasquez's promising first novel, which is set in Belize, fading boxer Miles Young is planning to hang up his gloves and dedicate himself to raising his small daughter, Lani. Then he receives an offer too good to pass up—the chance to fight ex-champ Hakeem Wahen in Florida in three weeks if he'll agree to help Isabelle Gilmore, an attractive well-to-do woman, find her missing 17-year-old daughter, Rian. Besides decamping with her undesirable boyfriend, the son of a corrupt former police inspector, Rian has taken a load of cash from her mother. Isabelle claims her interest in locating Rian is purely maternal, but Young suspects she has been less than honest with him. An inexperienced gumshoe, Young winds up paying dearly for his involvement in the case. While the story ends somewhat predictably, Vasquez, who grew up in Belize, does a good job of conveying his native country's underbelly and making Young a credible, if flawed, figure. (June)
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Aging boxers turned sleuths just could be a crime-fiction trend. First we had welterweight Eddie Caro in David Fulmer’s The Blue Door (2008), set in 1950s Philadelphia, and now, from a different hemisphere, we have Miles Young, an aging heavyweight in contemporary Belize. Eddie knows he’s done after a particularly tough loss and takes up sleuthing on the rebound, but Miles is looking for one more payday and agrees to help a rich woman find her missing teenage daughter as a way of paying the fight promoter. Naturally, the case turns out to be more complicated than first appears—the girl and her boyfriend have absconded with a wad of cash belonging to a local gangster—and soon enough Miles is in well over his head. Subplots involving Miles’ estranged wife and his young daughter—as well as the coming-of-age traumas of the runaway teens—add heft, but this is a straight-ahead, hard-boiled detective story overlaid with superb atmosphere. The Belize setting puts Caribbean noir on the genre map—think Florida without the neon, or an ever-so-slightly-less-bent version of Kent Harrington’s Tijuana (in Dia de los Muertos, 1997). --Bill Ott

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312378092
• ISBN 13: 9780312378097
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256