The King of Swords by Nick Stone

The King of Swords



Download The King of Swords




The King of Swords Nick Stone
Language: English
Page: 576
Format: pdf
ISBN: 0060897317, 9780061725128
Publisher:

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. At the start of Stone's chilling second thriller, set in the early 1980s and the prequel to Mr. Clarinet (2007), Det. Sgt. Max Mingus and his black partner, Det. Joe Liston, think a decomposed body discovered in a primate park in Miami, Fla., is just one of the city's more bizarre murders. But when a tarot card—the ominous King of Swords—is found in the victim's stomach and his entire family killed, it's clear something darker is at work. The detectives are soon hot on the trail of a young Haitian pimp and his fortune-teller mother, who are thought to be linked to voodoo gang leader Solomon Boukman. Rumors abound about Boukman's human sacrifices and allegiance to the voodoo god of death, Baron Samedi, but few have actually seen his face. With police corruption rampant, Mingus and Liston realize that in order to take down Boukman, they'll have to hunt him alone. The violence is every bit as gruesome as in Clarinet, but Stone expertly harnesses it to propel his multilayered saga of good, evil and everything in between. (Dec.)
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From

*Starred Review* Miami Task Force (MTF) detective Max Mingus and his partner, Joe Liston, are summoned to Primate Park because a corpse has been found there. But the arrival of forensic specialists, ambulances, and uniformed cops allows 200 monkeys to get loose in metropolitan Miami. It’s just another day in a city already reeling from the cocaine epidemic, the violence of the cocaine cowboys, the Mariel boatlift, and the worst urban rioting since Watts. It’s 1981, morning in Ronald Reagan’s America. But the Primate Park corpse leads Max and Joe to the slaughtered family of the corpse and ultimately to a preternaturally cunning and brutal Haitian drug lord who has connections within the MTF, the Haitian government, and possibly even the CIA, and who terrifies even the Colombian drug cartels. At some 570 pages, The King of Swords is a big crime novel, and it is also a bit messy, but British author Stone has a grand story to tell, and he does it with panache. It’s the story of a city and an era (the Reagan reference isn’t gratuitous), at once hilarious and tragic. It’s a story filled with characters that range from honorable to morally ambiguous to frighteningly evil. It’s filled with voodoo rituals, crooked cops, street life, and wrenching descriptions of how bullet-riddled corpses decompose in tropical heat. Big and messy, yes, but also brilliant. --Thomas Gaughan