a.k.a. Sheila Doyle — Pat Jordan

The action comes fast and rough in this hotly paced crime novel set in steamy South Florida, and the plot is as unpredictable as the striking, sharp-witted, and slightly over-the-hill stage actress at its center. She's the recently divorced Sheila Mackenzie, nee Ryan, and when she meets the sometime male stripper and full-time operator Bobby Squared -- or Robert Redfeather, as the Cherokee case may be -- she overnight discovers inside her fortyish self a furiously passionate, daring, and driven Sheila she never knew. Call her Doyle, she soon finds herself rubbing elbows, and more, with Cuban gangsters, neo-Nazi gunrunners, Rastafarian hitmen, Italian drug dealers, and trigger-happy rednecks. She also picks up some trigger skills of her own. She needs them, too. Unwittingly she, Bobby, and Bobby's fat, balding, and all-business partner in crime, Sol Bilstein, have become entangled in a deadly web of vengeance that could turn the private army of Cuban political exile Juan Jose Medina against them all. The ruthless Medina may never forget a face, but actress Sheila Doyle has many of them -- and some talents her stage career never tested. Only now Sheila Doyle is playing for keeps and playing for real. And it could be curtains.