BACK TO BLOOD BY: TOM WOLFE

Tom Wolfe hadn’t written for awhile, so I was delighted when Back To Blood hit the shelves in October, 2012.

This novel takes aim at Miami, and gives the reader a birds eye view of the various groups that now call Miami home. This is a good look at our postmodern era whose multicultural languages and backgrounds are not really interested in melting into one pot! At least not in Miami!

The main hero is Officer Nestor Camacho, a Cuban cop who made it into the police department and becomes famous over night when he was on patrol on a police launch speeding across Miami Biscayne Bay.

Nestor has many talents, but they are all put to the test when his whole neighborhood thinks he is a turn coat when he saves a man’s life in an impossible hilarious rescue out on the Bay.

Through Nestor’s eyes we meet the Cuban Mayor, the black police chief, an anglo sex addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse and girl friend and his wealthy patient who is porn addicted. As the plot proceeds we also meet the Miami Heralds hot young reporter and his boss the editor who both went to Yale, and are spreading the news about Nestor in newspaper headlines. Nestor finally, also meets Ghislaine, who he saves from the drug crowd while she is volunteering her help to the children of these drug addicts. Her father is a Haitian professor who thinks he’s really French and wants his daughter, who is beautiful and kind, to be French. His son is in with the wrong crowd , and Nestor finds himself trying to help this high school boy.

Onward we glide to get a view of the Columbus Day Regatta “spectators” and their interest in the apr’es-race orgy. The group of shady Russians are next, who are cheating the Art Museum and art dealers and buying public!

Tom Wolfe’s on scene high energy reporting that put his previous best selling novels at the top,is brilliant, serious and yet hilarious. Beneath all the rhetoric, the reader gains a view that is unique of Miami and its clash of cultures. This author of a dozen books, including The Right Stuff , and Bonfire of the Vanities, still lives in New York City. Published: Little, Brown And Company Hachette Book Group 175 Fifth Avenue 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Copyright: © 2012 By: Tom Wolfe Reviewed: 11/30/12 – 362 Copyright: © 2012 by Joan G. Smith 362