HURRICANE FATS

"A Lawrence De Maria title gives you more bang for your buck than just about anything in the book marketplace today." (FLORIDA WEEKLY); "Pulitzer-nominee Lawrence De Maria has another winner in Cole Sudden, an assassin working in an obscure C.I.A. unit even the agency worries about!" (John Crudele, NEW YORK POST); "A master of thriller dialogue." (WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS); "While De Maria may have been an award-winning financial reporter, he's an awfully good fiction writer as well." (NAPLES DAILY NEWS)***Auburn Longstreet's Caribbean-based Ponzi scheme took in $300 million before he was caught. Thousands of small investors lost their life savings as the slippery six-foot-four con man spent the bulk of the money on crooked politicians who protected him from prosecution. But Longstreet kept $35 million that "rightly" belonged to a New Orleans mob boss - and arranged to have the mobster convicted on evidence he secretly supplied the Feds. The jailed Don dies in prison thinking his chief lieutenant turned on him. Enter an ultra-secret unit of the Central Intelligence Agency that bumps off mob turncoats in return for cash and intelligence on terrorists provided by vengeful crime bosses. One of its "clients" is Fats Boudreau, the dead Don's brutal son. He pays the C.I.A. to kill the lieutenant, who is in witness protection. When Fats discovers that Longstreet is the real traitor and that Cole Sudden killed the wrong man, he goes berserk. He wants both Longstreet and Sudden dead - and all his money back, including the $35 million!Add a cadaverous Las Vegas hit man and a monster Category 5 storm into the volatile mix and HURRICANE FATS builds to a shattering climax. ***Winner of an Associated Press award for crime reporting, Lawrence De Maria later cut his teeth on financial corruption at The New York Times and Forbes.