From Charlie Smith, critically acclaimed poet and author of Three Delays, comes a thrilling, moving, and sun-dappled noir
Cotland Sims, a gangster from Miami, must come home to Key West because his mother’s house has fallen off its stilts. For a long time, maybe since always, he’s been estranged from his distant, combative mother, who is only now, in her old age, beginning to soften, starting to circle back to Cot, the son she had disowned. Motivated by the chance to help his mother (along with collateral financial gain), Cot decides to snatch a trove of emeralds that his boss back in Miami, the relentlessly vicious Albertson, kept hidden on a small island. And that’s when the trouble starts. Cot has 48 hours to return the emeralds before he and his family—his younger, slow-minded brother; his life-long, pseudo-girlfriend; his wise, wary mother—are all killed.
This tropical thriller becomes a dark fight for survival and a struggle for existential sustenance. By the end, there are heart-breaking deaths, maddening betrayals, and enough shots fired to fill a pool with bullets.
In Men in Miami Hotels, Smith tells the story of Cot Sims, a listing Miami gangster who returns to Key West aiming to—among other things—save his fool-proof mother from homelessness after a recent hurricane. For love, for cash, and for the hell of it, he snatches a trove of emeralds that his boss, the relentlessly vicious Albertson, keeps hidden on a small island. And then trouble, which has been coiling around him for years like a snake, bites.
Cot has forty-eight hours to return the emeralds before items of equal or greater value—namely, the lives of everyone he loves—are repossessed by Albertson and his army of hired gunmen. Fleeing across the Caribbean, Cot blazes a trail of survival, skeltering between the narrowing walls of fate.
Charlie Smith has been called a novelist of "appalling brilliance" on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Critics have praised his work with the fervor of converts. And his prose, as radiant and dynamic as it has ever been, "lands him in the ranks of America's greatest contemporary fiction writers" (Houston Chronicle).
"In the end I was too interested in the unexpected plot, too surprised by his characters, too taken with his turns of phrase, to reject him. I was also too seduced by the island sounds and scent of the coastal foliage, the softer, lovelier side of the Orientalist gaze."
