“My name is Steve Bentley, and I’d seen Chula Marques on TV before, but seeing Chula perform in person was something entirely different. The TV tube had always shot her from the waist up. Now I knew why.Her voice was throaty and true, the way Latin voices are supposed to be, but nothing sensational. What made the customers edge forward was what she did with her hips and legs while she was singing. The message was a little too basic for the home audience.
Oh, she was quite a little girl all right, a girl of many faces. Daughter of a penny ante revolutionist, protege of the biggest racketeer since Al Capone, estranged wife of a too-handsome Princetonian type who was drowning his misery the slow painful way.
My client, Chula Marques, singer of songs. My love, carrier of murder…”
An old Cha-Cha fisherman find the naked body of ex-casino boss Victor Polo floating off the Frenchtown docks and brings his corpse back to town. By noon, a Calypso band had penned a tune for poor Victor… and soon everybody on the island knew the words:
Seven Sizzling Novels in the Steve Bentley Series in One Action-Packed Ebook!
In life, he’d been every inch The Baron… master of an old Victorian mansion in Georgetown and all he could survey. But now Baron Alejandro Esquivel was just so much fodder for the worms… and it was up to Steve Bentley, ex-spy-turned-CPA, to find out why. Bentley knew Esquivel’s wife Anita very well… and he knew her half-sister just well enough to know that he wanted to know her better.
“I’m Bentley, Steve Bentley. You might ask what a C.P.A. is doing assisting the D.C. police… and chasing a murderer and racketeers. Well. it all had to do with the ‘Good Neighbor’ policy. I happened to become involved when my oh-so-friendly neighbor in a black negligee invited me over for a nightcap. Only before I could change into something a little more comfortable, some other Romeo stole the scene — and some incriminating evidence. He left my neighbor with a stocking around her neck…"
Land of the Eternal Sucker. That was Coral City, Slade County, Florida in 1956. By day, the tourist robbery is genteel… practiced by scrubbed and bowing clerks, merchants, and restauranteurs who wait all year to gouge and swindle out-of-town customers. But it’s at night that the real money is made… at tourist cabins, at cockfights, and at plush, private clubs where the only winner is the house and nobody seems to care. Nobody except Pop Seegar, who owns everything that makes money and ruins lives in Slade County.