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For ten years now, Angelina Amaro has kept a secret so deep, so personal, that she couldn't share it with anyone, not even her closest relative. She is in love. In love with the man who betrayed her father, Mafia capo Paul Amaro, and sent him away to prison. All these years she has pined for Sal Martucci, knowing that the intense - though chaste - love they shared would, someday, bring him back to her. But Sal is now Ziggy Maxx, living with a new name and a new face, dodging cameras and cops, tending bar and running scams in Key West. He hasn't thought about Angelina for years (she never even put out, after all), but he sure has thought about her father: a man who wants nothing more than to see Ziggy dead. And has the power to get it done. But fate always intervenes where true love is involved, and when Angelina sees a pair of hands mixing a drink in a relative's Florida vacation video, she recognizes something that only the obsessed and lovesick ever could. So she packs her bags and heads to Mile Marker One - knowing that somehow, she would find her Sal. While there, she pals up with a young gay man who has his own romantic dreams of what he might find in the sun. But what Angelina doesn't realize is that her father is on to her whereabouts; and Sal's sleazy cronies are on to the value having a capo's daughter in their midst.

Publishers Weekly

Goofball goombahs careen through Shames's latest Florida-based comic thriller, a Mafia slapstick that has its funny moments but lacks the depth or vigor to carry a reader's interest along for the entire ride. Ziggy Maxx, working as a bartender in Key West, was Sal Martucci before he ran away from the Witness Protection Program. Now he augments his tips with small-time crime for a local mobster and turns his face away from tourist cameras for fear that Paul Amaro, the New York capo he ratted out, will recognize him under all his plastic surgery. Ziggy's plight is meant to arouse sympathy, but his personality is so roughly sketched that it's hard to understand why Amaro's daughter, the winsome virgin Angelina, would have pined for such a putz for eight years. But pine she has. And, after her uncle Louie shows some home movies of his Key West vacation, including a shot of a bartender making a Virgin Heat cocktail, Angelina, having recognized the bartender's dexterous hands, leaves New York for the sultry Key in search of her lost love. There's also a gay tourist named Michael with convenient access to a homosexual resort hotel, Louie's nagging wife, some fumbling feds and a selection of New York and Florida felons. Shames (Tropical Depression) executes his strokes smoothly, but those strokes are all painted strictly in primary colors, by the numbers. Major ad/promo; author tour. (Mar.) FYI: Hyperion will simultaneously publish Tropical Depression in paperback.