Razor-Sharp & Bloody
Honest Jim Reviews Carmen Amato's Latest Mystery
Carmen Amato strikes again with another morally complex, bloody and insightful mystery that perches Acapulco’s first female homicide detective, Emilia Cruz, on a high wire with lots of toothy villains circling below, waiting for her fall.
That makes the title, Barracuda Bay, dead-solid perfect, signaling a tense and perilous voyage past schools of predators after opening with the locked-room murder of the sister of the resort city’s female mayor at the high-pressure height of her reelection campaign.
The case rapidly expands, rocketing Cruz down the trail of an ex-boyfriend with secrets to hide, corrupt cops and politicians, shadowy cartel thugs and the slick and smooth rich who float above Acapulco’s violence and poverty, leading to a collision with her own estranged brother, Rafa Gamboa Escobar, a shape-shifting monster who once raped her while previously posing as a high priest of the Santa Muerte death cult.
Cruz has long wanted to kill him, not only for what he did to her but for his role promoting the trafficking of girls and young women as El Acólito, a deceitful attempt at humility given the powerful evil of his actions.
In the past, her hand was stayed by his elusive actions and the revelation that he is an undercover federale, a role she has also played when seconded to a sketchy financial crimes unit, working for Vincente Campos, a duplicitous snake who is now running an op out Casa de Plata -- House of Silver, the same austere glass-and-concrete building where the body of the mayor’s sister was found.
While Cruz’s fratricidal urge is still strong, she is soon forced to rely on her brother, born Ernesto Cruz Encinos before her family was torn apart, as an ally as killers close in on them both.
You can almost see the evil glint in the author’s eye as she jacks the stakes up even higher with the sudden murder of Campos and a mercy mission that sends Cruz to El Norte and the suburban Washington, D.C. townhouse where the dead federale’s wife and child live, unaware of the horrible news they’re about to hear from a stranger’s lips.
Big surprise. Campos answers the door, very much alive but on the run to avoid getting whacked and to smoke out killers from the same cartel that probably ordered the murder of the mayor’s sister.
Cruz barely has time to recover from this shock when unwelcome guests arrive at the townhouse doors -- two killers posing as local cops. Cruz, sipping coffee in the kitchen, hears the whup! of suppressed pistol shots and the thud of Campos’ body before bolting out the back door and escaping through a gauntlet of wooden fences and barking dogs, leaving her purse, passport and credentials behind.
Rafa to the rescue. Barely. Read the book to find out.
This is rich, yeasty stuff, shot through with bloodshed, rage and sudden shifts and turns that keeps the adrenalin flowing. It’s also vivid and real as a dime because the author, a former CIA officer whose service included counter-drug operations in Mexico, infuses her Emilia Cruz novels with all she witnessed and experience as an American spook.
That gives these novels an iron-clad authenticity mere money and naked imagination can’t buy, which is equally true of the author’s terrific historical series, the Galliano Club mysteries, richly based on her family’s Italian American history in upstate New York and her grandfather’s stories as a Prohibition-era deputy.
Back to the book. Cruz has always has one foot in the wildly addictive world of a homicide cop in a city of maximum glamor and violence. Her other foot is in the life she shares at the peak of that glitz with Kurt Rucker, who runs a palatial beachfront hotel where they live in a penthouse suite as a couple engaged to be married.
That means there are two questions readers must confront. One blares full volume, center stage -- will Cruz survive? The other is a strong backbeat, insistent but thrumming in the background -- will Cruz ditch the badge she fights so hard to keep for the rich safety of Kurt’s world?
Only one of these questions gets answered.
Sales link: https://www.amazon.com/Barracuda-Bay-Detective-Emilia-Novel/dp/B0DSTY1ZCT