Charles Willeford_Hoke Moseley 04

When Miami Homicide Detective Hoke Moseley receives an unexplained order to let his beard grow, he doesn't think much about it. He has too much going on at home, especially with a man he helped convict ten years before moving in across the street. Hoke immediately assumes the worst, and considering he has his former partner, who happens to be nursing a newborn, and his two teenage daughters living with him, he doesn't like the situation on bit. It doesn't help matters when he is suddenly assigned to work undercover, miles away, outside of his jurisdiction and without his badge, his gun, or his teeth. Soon, he is impersonating a drifter and tring to infiltrate a farm operation suspected of murdering migrant workers. But when he gets there for his job interview, the last thing he is offered is work.In this final installment of the highly acclaimed Hoke Moseley novels, Charles Willeford's brilliance and expertise show on every page. Equally funny, thrilling, and disturbing, The Way We Die Now is a triumphant finish to one of the most original detective series of all time.From the Trade Paperback edition.From Publishers WeeklyDetective Hoke Mosely, the protagonist of Willeford's Miami Blues and other novels, returns in this latest mystery set in Miami and nearby Collier County. Hoke is a busy man: his teenage daughters and live-in ex-partner keep his head turning at home; his work on the cold-case file has at last yielded a clue in a physician's murder; and two men from the Caribbean isles have turned up dead in an apartment sprayed by an exterminator. Further, a killer Hoke nabbed 10 years earlier, unexpectedly paroled, has chosen to lease a home facing Hoke's own. That's not all. In the Everglades, Haitian migrant workers are missing and a particularly vicious redneck farmer is suspected of killing them. So Hoke is summoned for special assignment, and then police work really gets interesting. If ever there was a mystery writer who dismissed Alfred Hitchcock's disdain for the "plausibles," it is Willefordhe is meticulous about the details of Hoke's police and personal life. As if to balance his low-key approach and the amassing of mundane minutiae, Willeford draws a shockingly violent, ugly scene in which the redneck's hired man beats Hoke and attempts to rape him. And simmering beneath the surface is Hoke's nearly sociopathological obsession with the racial tensions between the ethnic groups who uneasily co-exist in southern Florida. As usual with Willeford's crime novels, this is an absorbing, often amusing and disturbing read. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review"No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford." --Elmore Leonard“If you are looking for a master’s insight into the humid decadence of South Florida and its polyglot tribes, nobody does that as well as Mr. Willeford.” --The New York Times Book Review“Willeford builds up enormous tension--you are compelled to keep reading.” --The Philadelphia Inquirer“Pure pleasure . . . Mr. Willeford never puts a foot wrong.” —The New YorkerFrom the Trade Paperback edition.