The Way We Die Now Hardcover – March 12, 1988 by Charles Willeford 
Book 4 of 4: Hoke Moseley Detective Series
 
Look the Part. Die the Part.

A three-year-old murder case was coming together nicely. A killer Hoke had once put in prison has moved into the house across the street. And Hoke Moseley's daughter has blue hair. But now Hoke has to walk away from his life and pretend to be a bum. Turns out it isn't hard.

Hoke hands over his teeth, wallet, and gun on the hot Tamiani Trail -- the highway that connects Miami and Naples by way of the alligator-infested Everglades. Hoke's boss, Major Willie Brownley, has arranged this little undercover adventure. And what an adventure it will be.

In a dusty corner of South Florida, Hoke enters a world of Haitian migrant workers, soup kitchens, and forgotten whores. And in the searing heat he'll meet the man he's been sent to kill -- the most vicious beast in the land...


From the Paperback edition.
 
From Publishers Weekly
Detective Hoke Mosely, the protagonist of Willeford's Miami Blues and other novels, returns in this latest mystery set in Miami and nearby Collier County. Hoke is a busy man: his teenage daughters and live-in ex-partner keep his head turning at home; his work on the cold-case file has at last yielded a clue in a physician's murder; and two men from the Caribbean isles have turned up dead in an apartment sprayed by an exterminator. Further, a killer Hoke nabbed 10 years earlier, unexpectedly paroled, has chosen to lease a home facing Hoke's own. That's not all. In the Everglades, Haitian migrant workers are missing and a particularly vicious redneck farmer is suspected of killing them. So Hoke is summoned for special assignment, and then police work really gets interesting. If ever there was a mystery writer who dismissed Alfred Hitchcock's disdain for the "plausibles," it is Willefordhe is meticulous about the details of Hoke's police and personal life. As if to balance his low-key approach and the amassing of mundane minutiae, Willeford draws a shockingly violent, ugly scene in which the redneck's hired man beats Hoke and attempts to rape him. And simmering beneath the surface is Hoke's nearly sociopathological obsession with the racial tensions between the ethnic groups who uneasily co-exist in southern Florida. As usual with Willeford's crime novels, this is an absorbing, often amusing and disturbing read.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 
 
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