Back To Blood, Wolfe - B

                                         Tom Wolfe is a great writer and because he wrote one of the handful of books I've ever reread -'The Right Stuff'- my expectations were probably too high for this book.  It is kind of interesting and ok, but certainly not great. I often wonder what skills can be maintained at the top of the pyramid, so to speak, for someone  in their eighties.  Also, he appears to have become obsessed with sex. I believe his last two outings, 'Hooking Up' and 'I am Charlotte Simmons' are about, well, hooking up. Why else would you have hundreds of phrases like this; "her perfectly formed, perfectly suntanned legs looking a lubricious mile long atop a pair of white crocodile pumps whose to-the max heels lifted her heavenly while Venus moaned and sighed" throughout the   book.
                                        In order to satirize any city, society, culture, it helps to have characters who are out- sized and over-the-top and that is what we have here.  For a pumped-up Cuban cop - Nestor Camacho;  for a Cubana cutie on the make - Magdalena Otero; for a psychotic psychiatrist -  Norman Lewis; for his debauched billionaire pervert patient- Maurice Fleischmann; for a WASP Yalie editor - Edward T. Topping IV; for a spineless politician - Mayor Dionisio Cruz; for a Russian oligarch - Sergei Korolyov, and-my favorite for the hard-ass African-American police chief - Cyrus Booker.
                                       The city is, of course, Miami, presented here as definitely not-part-of-America.  The Cubans are portrayed as a people temporarily and inconveniently here because they can't be in Havana.  The Russians appreciate the freedom, the opulence and good-times, but loathe the country that provides them.  All in all, notwithstanding the criticisms, if you have the time, there are quite a few laughs here.