MARIMBA

A Doberman with a taste for human flesh and the voodoo-and- shopping-mad family who keep him well fed are somewhere near the center of Hoyt's (Darwin's Secret, Whoo?, etc.) Miami drug-trade thriller. ``Marimba'' is Miami slang for the drug business. It is also the name of the Martinez family pet, an excessively muscular Doberman. The upwardly mobile Cuban-American Martinezes—widowed mother, two sumptuous sisters, and baseball-crazy brother—have been keeping their doggie in shape with regular feedings of pieces of drug-dealers and undercover drug-agents. Devoutly religious Mother Martinez has brought together her passion for the Afro- Catholic saints-and-spirits cult of Santer°a with her profitable corner of the drug business, a service that involves sending her beautiful daughters out to vamp real and would-be marimba players as directed by a cocaine kingpin. The girls' victims become offerings on the altar of the family spirit and then go to feed the dog. These lovely people are only a small part of the astonishing corruption that pervades Miami. There is also major rot in the local police, some decay in the FBI, and a broad base of citizens who would trade their good names for drug profits in a minute. There is, however, an incorruptible senator in Washington with an interest in busting the trade, and she has her own agent on the scene—James Burlane, a pilot whose flying skills have attracted interest as far away as Colombia. Under deepest cover, Burlane has wormed his way into the heart of the marimba and concurrently become romantically involved with Katherine Donovan, the sister of a cocaine addict. Ms. Donovan has her own interest in the local economy. Ties up rather too neatly, but before that happens, there are hours of creepy, cynical, sophisticated thrills. Hoyt's rapacious Miamians leave you gasping.