James W. Hall, Magic City

Magic City

James W. Hall

St. Martin's, March 2007, $24.95

ISBN: 0312271794

While the world is stunned when the brash Louisville Lip Cassius Clay defeats Sonny Liston in Miami to win the boxing heavyweight championship, nearby mass murders occur. Someone viciously kills three members of the Cuban exile Morales family and four militiamen loyal to the patriarch. Twelve year old Snake and his younger brother Carlos are the only survivors, but the older sibling vowed vengeance one day. Mayor Stanton King and his wife adopt the orphaned Morales brothers. The mass murders are never solved.

Four decades pass, with the mass murders back in 1964 remaining a cold case. King sees a photo from the first Clay-Liston fight that has him sitting with four covert operatives. He sends his two adopted boys after each copy they can find; Carlos kills the photographer. He and Snake come after Lawton, father of Alexandra, whom Thorn is visiting. Thorn stops them but they escape. They try again, which motivates Thorn to learn why.

MAGIC CITY is a tense thriller, as an incident related to a major boxing match forty years ago comes home to roost for a former big city politician. The storyline is action-packed, though most readers will ignore King's assertion that a photo from the Clay-Liston first fight in 1964 could impact national security as implausible, even with the current administration reclassifying documents from the 1950's. As the good (Thorn), the bad (Snake), and the ugly (Carlos) tangle, others want the photo's too in James W. Hall's zany crime thriller.