Novel set in USA, VIETNAM and JAPAN
Bloody Miami

Location(s): Miami
Genre(s): Fiction
Era(s): Modern
What sex was to Sigmund Freud, status is to Mr Wolfe: the ultimate drive. In this, his first novel in eight years, Magdalena, the girlfriend of his protagonist, Nestor Camacho, an officer with the Miami Marine Patrol, longs to escape the Cuban “ghetto of Hialeah”. Magdalena dumps Nestor for Norman Lewis, a psychiatrist specialising in porn-addiction with an addiction of his own: social climbing. A Haitian professor has haute ancestral aspirations-he believes he is “essentially European” and insists his children speak French at home. A Russian oligarch and a big-shot Miami billionaire try to outmanoeuvre each other to spend millions on the artist du jour at Art Basel Miami. (There are lashings of ink at what Mr Wolfe calls “the ludicrous practical joke” of contemporary art.) In a world where you are what you own, the right stuff turns out to be a pair of white crocodile high heels and a Ferrari 403. The Economist
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