The Mango Opera

New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Denny Cody (Jacket photograph). Format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8.5 inches. [8], 295, [1] pages. Signed by the author on the title page. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Tom Corcoran is a Florida-based writer of mystery novels. He has also authored three books on classic Ford Mustangs. Corcoran is friends with Jimmy Buffett and shot photographs for seven of Buffett's album covers, as well as cowrote the hits "Fins" and "Cuban Crime of Passion". The Mango Opera is a very engrossing novel. Corcoran deftly evokes the spirit and physicality of the place, the low-tide jubilance and enlivening features of its pleasures and instinctive criminality, as if the sun and ocean had blasted all the flowers of evil into its very genes. This is an evil book about an evil place. The Mango Opera is a powerful debut novel full of juicy characters, crackling dialogue, and thrill-a-minute action. Part-time Key West crime-site photographer Alex Rutledge is awakened by his estranged girlfriend in the middle of the night and is even more startled when she announces her new roommate, to whom she bears a striking resemblance, has been murdered. Key West has been rendered so vividly and with such spare poetry. This is a smart, exciting novel, one not to be missed. The genius of imagination and the genius of realism don't often take up housekeeping in one writer's skull. But Tom Corcoran has combined a viciously creative plot with a perfectly rendered description of Key West as it really is, and the result is good to the bone. The only reason you'll put down this book is to dash off a note to Tom telling him to write another. Derived from a Kirkus review: Even though he's AIDS-free, sex with Key West photographer Alex Rutledge can be hazardous to your health. One of his former lovers has barely escaped a carjacking attempt, and two others are dead. Annie Minette, who broke off a three-year relationship with Alex less than a month ago, is back on his doorstep because her roommate, Public Defender Ellen Albury, has also been murdered, to all appearances by the same man. The local cops are too polite to identify that man as Alex—after all, they know him from the crime-scene photos he's often snapped for them—but he thinks it might be a good idea to run down the killer anyway, before he gets run down himself (a distinct possibility), or before Annie, who may well have been the intended victim instead of look-alike Ellen, ends up in the morgue. Alex can't help worrying that the killings are tied to a trip he made 20 years ago to photograph a Marielito rescue, and of course he's right. But with so many ladies dead or under attack, there's plenty of suspicion to go around among charter skipper Sam Wheeler, senior investigator Avery Hatch, and former political prisoner Raoul Balbuena, whose credentials as local hero and father of one of the victims don't keep him from looking even guiltier than Alex. So many suspects turn out to be guilty, in fact, that you may wonder why the feds don't just cut the island loose and set it adrift. But then you'd lose the evocative locations that are among this first novel's biggest pluses.