Sam Hawken, Dagger Award nominee for his Mexican-American border crime novels (Tequila Sunset, Missing), relocates his Latino savvy and violence-laden prose to the warehouses, seedy motels and working marinas of a Cuba-centric Miami. Resurrecting a character from earlier novellas, The Night Charter features Camaro Espinoza--a rugged single woman who drives a Harley and runs her own 50-foot Custom Carolina charter boat on night trips to the Gulf Stream. Camaro (so named by her father who loved Detroit iron) has a history. When her life or her boat is at risk, she saddles up with a boot-stuffed karambit knife and her Glock 38 "chambered in .45 GAP with a single stack of eight rounds." But mostly, she now just wants time to herself and "to keep it simple, that's all. Boat. Water. Fish."
Detached and simple, though, fly out the window when she goes soft for the down-on-his-luck ex-con Parker Story, who needs to repay a sadistic prison cellmate who "protected" him. The deal involves making a clandestine run to Cuba to bring to Miami an underground anti-Castro insurgent wanted by Cuba's Intelligence Directorate. Miami's 1960s paramilitary freedom fighter group Alpha 66 also wants him--for fund-raising. The trip goes wrong when the passenger gets kidnapped, the shooting starts and the Miami P.D. and FBI come knocking. Good-hearted Camaro has to sort it out with her wits, guts and arsenal. In short, staccato chapters, Hawken adds an accomplished new voice to the South Florida crime library. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.