Key West Capers

In the grand tradition of Elmore Leonard, Laurence Shames creates an outrageous heavyweight thriller that’s heavy on atmosphere and action. Joey Goldman is a low-level New York hustler. He’s taking a working vacation in South Florida and looking to score big with a time-share scam. His half brother Gino Delgatto is a man in need of a fall guy. When they meet in Key West, the term dysfunctional family takes on a new meaning. Will one of them succeed? Or will the Miami mob find an eye-popping way to dispose of them both?

On best-seller lists all over the country with his witty cynicism and delightfully dark humor, Laurence Shames writes thrillers that his fans endearingly classify as great “Florida noir.” In the tradition of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, he gives character to the inhabitants of Florida’s steamy underbelly. Artist Augie Silver’s friends are ostensibly grief-stricken when he drowns in a shipwreck off Scavenger Reef, but most of them are nervous because his body wasn’t found.

Listeners across the country have fallen in love with Laurence Shames’ rollicking national best-sellers set in South Florida. Energetic, forceful and unpredictable as a hurricane, Sunburn is filled with off-beat characters, top-notch suspense, and colorful dialogue. When aging Mafia godfather Vincente Delgatto flies to Key West to get a little sun, he decides to write his memoirs.

When Murray Zemelman, a.k.a. The Bra King, pops another Prozac and heads to the Keys, he has nothing much in mind beyond a quixotic hope of winning back his first wife, Franny, whom he dumped years before. But when he forms an unlikely friendship with Tommy Tarpon, the last remaining member of an obscure Indian tribe, another plan also starts shaping up in his fevered brain. Why not open up Key West's first casino?

Which is more powerful: romance or revenge? Mafia princess Angelina Amaro has only ever loved one man - and even that lone affair was never consummated. Why not? Because her would-be lover, Sal Martucci, fled into the Witness Protection Program after ratting out Big Paul, Angelina's father. But when Sal is discovered, a decade later, working as a bartender in Key West, the wildly dysfunctional Amaro clan heads south - one member with love on her mind, the others with murder in their hearts.

Laurence Shames’ funny, elegantly written, and hip thrillers have topped best-seller lists across the country, and earned him a leading role as a writer of “Florida noir” with Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. When Island Frigate advertising rep Suki Sperakis decides to write an exposé on the Key West black market, she is strangled and left for dead in the trunk of a car sinking slowly into the Gulf of Mexico.

When Al Marracotta, Mafia boss, takes a week’s vacation in Key West, he looks forward to days of sun, sex, and seafood. Alan Tuschman, New Jersey furniture salesman, is a reluctant tourist. He has won a week in Key West for his sales record. But they have something in common: vanity license plates that read BIG AL. So when two goons are sent to ruin Big Al’s vacation, it’s not long before they target the wrong guy. Between the frustrated henchmen and the baffled Als, each chapter grows loonier than the last. And with the addition of a romantic wild card, the tough guys’ schemes are tempered....

Popular crime novelist Laurence Shames consistently draws favorable comparisons to Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. In his Key West tales, Shames paints vivid, hilarious portraits of the sun-splashed “paradise” he calls home. The retired Pete Amsterdam isn’t really a private investigator. But he has a license, a gun, and a listing in the phone book—all so he can write-off his wine cellar as an “office.”

Take three speedboats, a disgruntled ghostwriter, and a hit TV show starring a gorgeous but impossible diva and created by a driven genius who may be losing his marbles. Add a fearless and gleefully profane stuntwoman, an ancient Mafioso with a chihuahua, and a revenge-crazed blonde in gladiator sandals. Stir in a thug with a heart of gold and an inveterate slacker who yearns for glory.

Wanted: NY apartment in exchange for a great Key West house with swimming pool. In February. Who wouldn't take a swap like that? Then again, if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is, as Meg and Peter Kaplan soon discover. Heading south for a supposed dream vacation, what they find instead is a panic attack waiting to happen. Coconuts crash through windows, bearing cryptic death threats.

Phoebe has a dream - a very modest dream. She wants to own a Sno-Cone truck at the beach in Key West. Nicky, her would-be boyfriend, also dreams small. All he wants is a decent gig as a guitar player in a bar. Doesn't seem like too much to ask of life, does it? So why do things keep going so dreadfully wrong for Phoebe and Nicky? Is it just plain bad luck? Or is it the decidedly bad intentions of a sleazy local cheat, a Miami gangster desperate to stay in business, and a murderous Cuban smuggler looking for a fall guy?

Meet Key West native Renita Daughtry - 22, wide-eyed, gorgeous, and very much in love with love. In other words, an irresistible target for professional impostor and pathological liar Richie Pestucci, who plans to charm her into utter helplessness. But there's just one problem. Renita's seeming naiveté masks a lot of savvy and a will of velvet-coated steel, and it isn't long before Richie, now smitten with his intended victim, starts to wonder just who is gaming who.

Unemployed TV writer Lenny Sullivan has been having trouble seeing his life and times as anything more than fodder for edgy wisecracks. But when he bolts to Key West, things suddenly turn serious. Well, sort of serious. A bullying businessman in league with a pair of bumbling mobsters is plotting to burn down his best friend’s struggling comedy club. The pill-popping star of his last best chance at a hit show is under a death threat from a very sore loser in a love triangle. And Lenny’s staunchest ally happens to be a 90-something named Bert the Shirt.

Key West has a new hero. He weighs four pounds and stands eight inches off the ground. His name is Nacho and he’s the bravest, shrewdest, funniest Chihuahua you will ever meet. He’ll do anything to help his master, the retired mafioso Bert the Shirt, and his friends - especially the beautiful Rita, with whom Nacho is smitten from the very first time she reaches down to scratch his ears.   

Fact: In September 1964, the Beatles, their private flight diverted by Hurricane Dora, made an unplanned visit to Key West. Fiction: Poolside at their motel, the Fab Four fell into conversation with a snappy-dressing local named Bert the Shirt, who listened as the band worked out a harmony to the most beautiful song he’d ever heard...and wouldn’t hear again for over half a century.

Well, Key West Normal is when two friends in need of a place to live drag away an abandoned hot dog truck in the middle of the night.... But an insomniac New Yorker has got himself trapped inside it while searching for his neurotic cat.... And the truck is the secret hub of a global smuggling operation and holds a stash worth millions.... But the tough guy sent to recover the fortune is way more interested in being reunited with his one true love.

Pete Amsterdam, world’s most reluctant private eye, is living the bachelor dream in Key West, Florida. Then his mother, the undaunted Gertie, shows up with her new hip, her large suitcase, and her gift for cutting remarks.

Two ghostwriters walk into a Key West bar and decide to swap gigs....