Men in Miami Hotels (A Novel)

A Paperback Original

From Charlie Smith, critically acclaimed poet and author of Three Delays, comes the thrilling, moving, and violent story of Cotland Sims, a Miami gangster hellbent on helping his mother—when he steals a trove of emeralds to cover costs, he risks losing everyone he loves

Charlie Smith has been called a novelist of “appalling brilliance” on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review. Critics praise his work with the fervor of conversion. And he continues to write distinctive, compelling, and powerful prose that plumbs the experience of consciousness, the demands of the heart, and the mortal commitment that binds us all together.

In Men in Miami Hotels, a man named Cotland, a gangster from Miami, must come home to Key West because his mother’s house has fallen off its stilts. For a long time, maybe since always, he’s been estranged from his distant, combative mother, who is only now, in her old age, beginning to soften, starting to circle back to Cot, the son she had disowned. Motivated by the chance to help his mother (along with collateral financial gain), Cot decides to snatch a trove of emeralds that his boss back in Miami, the relentlessly vicious Albertson, kept hidden on a small island. And that’s when the trouble starts. Cot has 48 hours to return the emeralds before he and his family—his younger, slow-minded brother; his life-long, pseudo-girlfriend; his wise, wary mother—are all killed. But Cot is formidable. He makes some unlikely escapes and executes nearly every assassino come to kill him with one of three pistols he keeps handy. But the violence is not gruesome or gory. Rather this tropical, sun-dappled noir becomes a dark fight for survival, a struggle for existential sustenance. By the end, there are heart-breaking deaths, maddening betrayals, and enough shots fired to fill a pool with bullets.