Rude Boys - Tapa dura

Gaylord Dold, hailed by Loren D. Estleman as "the best new stylist to enter the crowded field of private-eye fiction, and one of its most daring innovators," brings us another literate and suspenseful adventure for his remarkable sleuth, Mitch Roberts. Rude Boys, like Dold's recent A Penny for the Old Guy, finds American cowboy Roberts in London, "looking for his life" and "trying to fall in love" with English widow Amanda Smith. He is doing some work for Amanda's lawyer friend, Hillary Root, when Hillary's Jamaican half brother is found brutally murdered.
The crime is a grisly puzzle from the start. The man was in the hospital, well on the way to recovering from the mysterious illness that had put him there, when someone crept into his room and left him covered with blood, a gaping slash across his neck.
Hillary is deep in a seemingly hopeless case, the defense of another Jamaican man accused of robbery and murder. Fighting prejudice as a female in the ranks of British barristers, and as a half-Jamaican female at that, Hillary now begins to receive horrifying and wordless threats, like the "gift" of a slaughtered cat. Sympathy with her burdens impels Roberts to travel to Jamaica, seeking the roots of these possibly connected events.
Although his brief trip produces a number of answers as well as insight into the lives of Jamaicans at home and abroad, another murder takes place before Mitch is able to unravel the tight skein of horror and death and to set a strange kind of justice in motion.