BACK TO BLOOD by Tom Wolfe

If this final novel of Tom Wolfe’s had held my attention just a little more tightly, I would have given it five stars.  The setting is Miami, with its mélange of ethnicities.  The main character, Nestor Comache, is of Cuban heritage, but we also have a well-to-do Haitian family and several Russians of questionable moral fiber.  Nestor is a cop who is called upon to rescue a Cuban refugee from the top of a yacht’s mast, but his amazing feat brings him only disdain from his family, because the refugee will now probably be deported.  His beautiful but shallow girlfriend Magdalena dumps him, not because of the rescue but because she is now involved with her boss, a sleazy psychiatrist who treats porn addicts and aspires to the life of the rich and famous.  Next, Nestor alienates the black community after subduing a drug dealer and being caught on video shouting some racially charged verbal abuse.  During that encounter, he meets Ghislaine, the daughter of a Haitian college professor, and she is concerned about her brother’s possible gang affiliation and the fate of a teacher who has been arrested for attacking a belligerent student.  Wolfe handles these multiple interwoven storylines and perspectives seamlessly and without a confusing and meandering timeline that seems to be so popular with today’s novelists.  Wolfe wrote only four novels, and, although I liked all of them, this is my favorite.  Nestor is a heroic character who epitomizes the saying that no good deed goes unpunished.  He may be a little vain and naïve, but he has nothing but the best intentions, and he’s a pretty sharp cookie, too, albeit with a weakness for damsels in distress.