King of Swords, by Nick Stone

You thought Florida oranges were good for you? They can cause hideous injuries without leaving a trace, according to Nick Stone's cynical cop, Max Mingus, who has a habit of tangling with voodoo even when apparently sitting safely in Miami. This second outing for Max follows the success of Stone's debut, Mr Clarinet, with a cracking opening.

After a strange corpse appears among the beasts of Primate Park, the novel describes horrors more bestial than anything committed by Big Bruce, the cigar-smoking gorilla. Smoking is allowed, in this Miami of the early 1980s, where clunky computers rely on floppy discs in cardboard sleeves. Stone has a good eye for details which make the recent past seem distant.

Brutal and twisted Carmine Desamours is a pimp of Haitian origin who treats his prostitutes as casually as a deck of cards. He is in thrall to his sadistic and temperamental tarot-reading mother, Eva, whose belief in dark forces includes the dreaded ghoul, Baron Samedi. Eva uses a powerful drug derived from the calabar plant. Half a bean will make you spill the beans: a whole one will kill you in an hour.

This is no retirement city. In addition to the dangers presented by oranges and beans, Miami has become a cocaine hell-hole, where drug gangs torture their victims and wipe out families. But a new pattern emerges: murders where a tarot card is inserted in the victim's mouth, leading back to the witchcraft and soothsaying skills of the deadly Eva. Max has to learn the arts of divination: the major and minor arcana, and the meaning of the King of Swords.

Ranged alongside the Haitian nightmare is Solomon Boukman, the most powerful criminal in Miami. Solomon doesn't metaphorically speak with forked tongue: his is actually split like a snake's. Apart from this, no physical descriptions of him are ever the same and he takes care to operate through middlemen, with many turns and twists in pursuit of this scary villain.

The book is a heady brew which could easily spill over into the ludicrous. That it does not is a tribute to the quality of Stone's writing and the convincing character of Max. However corrupt and hard-nosed, he is a Chandlerian detective, defending the weak against the strong as he and his partner Joe make their way through these hot and druggy mean streets. This is highly evocative writing, carrying a powerful and original story.

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