Men in Miami Hotels

The hero of Smith’s latest venture into poeticized genre fiction is Cot Sims, a Miami gangster with a fondness for Virgil’s Georgics who returns to Key West to visit his estranged mother. Hoping to help her out of financial difficulties, Cot makes the fatal misstep of stealing precious emeralds from his ruthless boss, Albertson. His recklessness unleashes a torrent of reprisals that send him—along with his mother, brother, and married sometimes-lover, Marcella—on a desperate flight for survival. Dodging bullets and outwitting assassins, Cot struggles with his tempestuous love life and family relationships, all while fighting off a sense of existential homelessness. A poet as well as a novelist, Smith (Three Delays) writes in a curious blend of registers that has the narrative drive of an airplane read and the mystical resonance of verse, juxtaposing lyrical musings on memory and evocative descriptions of the Florida landscape with obligatory twists and betrayals. While the cartoonish violence sometimes seems at odds with the novel’s metaphysical depths, Smith nonetheless deserves credit for demonstrating that clichéd grindhouse plots are not incompatible with ravishing sentences. The result is a haunting and starkly grim fantasia on love, mourning, and the alienation inflicted by time. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (July)