Product Description

Miami, 1981. When Detective Max Mingus and his partner Joe are called to the scene of a death at Miami's Primate Park, it looks like another routine — if slightly bizarre — investigation. Until two things turn up: the victim's family, slaughtered; and a partly digested tarot card in the dead man's stomach. The King of Swords. An increasingly bloody trail leads Max and Joe first to a sinister fortune-teller and her scheming pimp son, then to the infamous Solomon Boukman. Few have ever met the most feared criminal in Miami, but rumours abound of a forked tongue, voodoo ceremonies and friends in very high places. Against a backdrop of black magic and police corruption, Max and Joe must distinguish the good guys from the bad - and track down some answers. What is the significance of the King of Swords? What makes those who have swallowed the card go on a killing spree just before they die? And can Max find out the truth about Solomon Boukman, before death's shadow reaches his own front door . . .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #315662 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 576 pages

Amazon.co.uk
Such was the acclaim that greeted Nick Stone’s amazing debut novel, Mr Clarinet, that a curious syndrome soon developed: if you hadn’t read the novel (and claimed to have any interest in the crime genre), you had to say (to all who would listen) ’I really must read Mr Clarinet -- I’ve heard so much about it!’ (preferably said with a pronounced guilty note in the voice). Such people, of course, should do themselves a favour and actually read the book – the sprawling, ambitious Haiti-set phantasmagoria broke new ground in several provocative ways for the crime field. It also introduced troubled detective Max Mingus – a vividly drawn protagonist -- and now here’s King of Swords, not so much a sequel to the debut novel, as a prequel with Max Mingus in his first terrifying encounter with his sinister nemesis Solomon Boukman.

So… the biq question: has Nick Stone matched that jaw-dropping debut?

Initially, this seems a very different kind of book – the setting is the more familiar Miami rather than a surrealistically realised Haiti. But -- relax – this is just as strong and disturbing a book as Mr Clarinet. In fact, those seeking a comfortable read should steer well clear – but if you’re looking for rough-edged crime fiction that will seriously unsettle you (and many of us seek exactly that), then King of Swords does the business -- look no further. And now -- how long do we have to wait for the third Nick Stone novel? --Barry Forshaw

Daily Express
'A delicious undercurrent of darkness . . . rivals some of the greats of the thriller genre'

Independent
'A cracking opening . . . with many turns and twists. A powerful and original story'

Customer Reviews

Wow!
Wow! By far the best book, I have read all year. Nick Stone's `Kings of Swords' is fantastic. He has certainly topped his previous awarding winning masterpiece `Mr Clarinet' the tension is kept up throughout the book and the featured characters are excellent. This book cannot be second-guessed even though we all know the inevitable outcome, which is an amazing achievement. I really hope there will be another instalment of Max Mingus in the near future.

Superb!
King of Swords is Nick Stone's follow-up to his critically acclaimed, multi-award winning bestseller, Mr Clarinet.

In a highly unusual move, Stone eschews the well-trodden path most crime/thriller writers take, and follows his hit debut not with a sequel, but a prequel.

King of Swords is set in the Miami of the early eighties, when the city had gone from being "America's playground" to "Murder Capital USA". Like the Haiti Stone described in Mr Clarinet, Miami is a violent, corrupt and treacherous place.

We meet Max Mingus - the conflicted "hero" of Mr Clarinet - again, only now as a thirty year old Miami cop. Max works for an elite unit of the Miami PD called the Miami Task Force (MTF), which operates more like a private army than an actual police division. If this sounds far-fetched, it's not. There were not one, but two such police units in Miami at the time, known as CENTAC, which operated a shoot to kill policy on drug traffickers.

Max and his partner, Joe Liston, investigate a seemingly routine death in a monkey-only zoo called Primate Park. The victim is a Haitian man, who, an autopsy later reveals, was either fed or swallowed a potion containing a shredded tarot card - the King of Swords. When Max and Joe go to visit the man's family, they find them all slaughtered.

As Max and Joe investigate, they are sucked further and further into a vortex of murder, ritual sacrifice and black magic, getting ever closer to the man rumoured to be behind it all - Solomon Boukman, a Haitian gang leader and Max's nemesis from Mr Clarinet.

Now, this being a prequel, readers will know from the outset that both Max and Solomon will live to torment each other another day. This should have resulted in a fairly pedestrian, tension-free book. Only it hasn't, because Stone has opened up the narrative to tell the story from the point of view of one of Boukman's gang members as well.

Said gang member is a vain but ultimately hapless pimp called Carmine. When you first encouter him Carmine seems to have rolled straight from the pages of a great lost Iceberg Slim or Donald Goines novel, but several pages in and you get under the facade. You meet Carmine's real boss - his VERY scary mother, Eva. Eva is a fortune teller with a highly refined sense of smell (you must really read it); she's also a Haitian Lady Macbeth, with a sadistic streak.

One of the incredible things about King of Swords is how you initially loathe Carmine, but finally - grudgingly - wind up rooting for him as he tries to dig his way out of the morass of evil that is his life. In many ways his grasping towards some kind of salvation, mirrors Max Mingus' attempts to do the right thing, despite being mired in a similar kind of corruption himself.

Carmine and Eva aren't the only unforgettable characters populating King of Swords either. There's Solomon Boukman - deeply sinister, but only ever glimpsed in shadows - a man whose mythology is somehow left intact at the very end of the book. Then there's his sweet-munching obese hitman, Bonbon (who wears a variety of dentures, including a set based on pirahna teeth). And there's Risquee, Carmine's nemesis - a prostitute he double crosses - think Lil Kim with even more attitude, who, in one of the funniest chapters in the book, tells Carmine he has no "pimp etiks", before concluding "You ain't no pimp - you a PIMP-el!".

But Stone isn't just good at writing bad or at best conflicted guys. Max's friend - and, in King of Swords, partner - Joe Liston is the book's conscience: an African-American cop in a then predominantly racist force (at the start of the book, the city is recovering from an infamous race riot where four white Miami PD officers were acquitted of killing an African-American man called Arthur McDuffie in cold blood, after a car chase - shades of Rodney King here), trying to stay true to both himself and his ideals while everything and everyone around him is going to hell in a bucket. Joe Liston is a carefully drawn character - dignified and moral, yet without a hint of self-righteousness. There's a speech towards the end of the book where he tells his redneck boss where to go that is surely the kind of thing anyone who's ever hated their boss has wanted to say at some point or another.

Apart from the narrative structure and the location (turn of the 80s Miami is a shabby, rundown place - faithfully brought back to life), where King of Swords differs quite substantially from Mr Clarinet is in the pacing. It's a big book, but boy does it FLY! Virtually from the first page. I read it in two days. It's also - in parts - very very funny. Check out the monkeys at the beginning, practically every part with Risquee, some of Carmine's hapless misadventures, the locker room dialogue between Max and Joe when Joe tells Max that churches are better places than nightclubs to meet women.

All in all, King of Swords isn't just a worthy follow-up to Mr Clarinet, but it is, in my opinion, a much much better book. Fans of Mr Clarinet will not want to miss this one. And neither will thriller/crime fans either. It's an absolutely superb book.

Roll on the next one please, Mr Stone ....

The Talented Mr Boukman
This prequel to "Mr.Clarinet" is almost as dark and what it sheds in darkness, it recoups in weirdness. The setting is Miami in the eighties, but features the shape-shifting voodoo lord Solomon Boukman who creates zombies to carry out his criminal and homocidal biding. Stone's cop Max Mingus isn't clever enough to outsmart the satanic Haitian, but he has a Rocky-like determination and grit, that keeps him going even when Boukman manages to turn Mingus into a zombie. Lots of thrillers about Miami, but none with the black inventiveness of Stone.