First Chapter, First Paragraph

Every Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Introsto share the first paragraph sometimes two, of a book that she’s reading or planning to read soon.

“You… You… You… edit my life… You are my wife, my Mac the Knife–the witticism here being that he may edit one of the half-dozen-or-so most important newspapers in the United States, the Miami Herald, but she is the one who edits him. She… edits… him. Last week he totally forgot to call the dean, the one with the rehabilitated harelip, at their son Fiver’s boarding school, Hotchkiss, and Mac, his wife, his Mac the Knife, was justifiably put out about it… but then he had sort-of-sung his little rhyme of his to the tune of ‘You Light Up My life’. You…edit my life… You are my wife, my Mac the Knife–and it made her smile in spite of herself, and the smile dissolved the mood, which was I’m fed up with you and your trifling ways. Could it possibly work again–now? Did he dare give it another shot?” ~Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe

As a police launch speeds across Miami’s Biscayne Bay-with our hero, officer Nestor Camacho, on board-Tom Wolfe is off and running headlong into the only city in the world where people from a different country with a different language and a different culture have taken over at the ballot box.

This melting pot is full of hard cases who just won’t melt, damn it: a Cuban mayor; a black police chief; a hot young reporter and a timid editor of the Miami Herald, both WASPs who went to Yale; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist who keeps his lovely Latina nurse, Magdalena, in his bed and his star patient, a porn-addicted billionaire, on a string; a status-addled Haitian professor who thinks he’s really French and wants his pale-skinned daughter to “pass” and his Creole-spouting son to be quiet.

Then there are the clueless collectors who “See it! Like it! Buy it!,” spending tens of millions per minute on de-skilled art at Miami Art Basel; black drug dealers colliding with the Cuban cops; Columbus Day Regatta “spectators” who only have eyes for the annual après-race orgy; and “Active Adult” condos full of yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers, not to mention a nest of shady Russians.