Hard Aground - Hardcover

Hall, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385307977 ISBN 13: 9780385307970

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 1992

Synopsis

450 years ago a treasure  ship went down. In Miami, the heat hasn't let up  yet...Hap Tyler tailboards on Biscayne bay, hears  voices, seduces young women, and lives on the edge  of history in his family's old-money mansion amid  Miami's pastel glitz. But while Hap stumbles around  in the shadow of his more successful older  brother, Daniel, a tangled web of deception and greed is  being spun around him --a web that leads Daniel to  his death.

Trying to solve his brother's murder, Hap  collides with a 450-year-old secret: the disappearance  of $400 million in a sunken Spanish plunder.  Daniel's upscale girlfriend is close to digging up the  treasure, an avaricious senator has already tasted  it, and a stone-cold killer will stop at nothing  to bring it home. For Hap a dark and bloody vein of  Florida and family history has been opened. And  the only way to close it is through a modern ritual  of violence and truth.


From the Paperback edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

o a treasure ship went down. In Miami, the heat hasn't let up yet...Hap Tyler tailboards on Biscayne bay, hears voices, seduces young women, and lives on the edge of history in his family's old-money mansion amid Miami's pastel glitz. But while Hap stumbles around in the shadow of his more successful older brother, Daniel, a tangled web of deception and greed is being spun around him --a web that leads Daniel to his death.

Trying to solve his brother's murder, Hap collides with a 450-year-old secret: the disappearance of $400 million in a sunken Spanish plunder. Daniel's upscale girlfriend is close to digging up the treasure, an avaricious senator has already tasted it, and a stone-cold killer will stop at nothing to bring it home. For Hap a dark and bloody vein of Florida and family history has been opened. And

Reviews

Miami provides a potent setting for Hall's ( Bones of Coral ; Tropical Freeze ) expertly spun crime thriller, a dark, often funny novel with a powerful kick. The book's plot encompasses both a sunken 17th-century galleon filled with Mayan treasures and a local 19th-century homicide. On Biscayne Bay, somewhat unstable Vietnam vet Hap Tyler makes windsurfers and leads tourists through historic Mangrove House--built by his grandfather, the legendary Commodore Randolph Tyler--where he lives with his brother Daniel, an archeologist. Hours after promising to tell Hap a family secret, Daniel is found dead, apparently of a heart attack. Hap blames Daniel's lover, Marguerite Rawlings, a crusading preservationist who hopes to restore her grandmother's mill on the mid-city site where her forebear, a vehement conservationist, was murdered 100 years before. After learning that Daniel's death was also a murder, Hap and Marguerite join forces against Marguerite's mother, a corrupt U.S. senator who hungers for Mayan artifacts. Hall intertwines the Tylers' and Rawlings' pasts with evocations of rhythmic, dangerous modern Miami, whose residents include a Vietnam hero, his flashy black ex-con girlfriend and a volatile Cuban ex-cop who bulldozes his dreams of fortune in the deftly orchestrated climax. Although a few of the colorful lowlifes occasionally speak a highlife diction, Hall, in the company of Elmore Leonard, Edna Buchanan, John Lutz and Carl Hiassen, gives the Sunshine State the fictional crime stature of L.A. and New York City. BOMC and QPB featured selections; major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385307977
• ISBN 13: 9780385307970
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360