The second book in the Jack Swyteck series

The newsstand had a half-dozen Russian language newspapers to choose from, and I wasn’t in Moscow. I was in Hollywood, Florida, a typical suburban community north of Miami. Naturally, I had to ask: What gives?

It turns out that south Florida – known for its ethnic diversity, though usually with a Latin beat – has a sizeable Russian population. The vast majority are law-abiding, good people. But there’s a dark side, too. Take Tarzan, for instance. No, not Johnny Weismüller. This Tarzan is a legendary, muscle-bound Russian mobster famous for the drug and sex orgies on his boat off Miami Beach. He’s now even more famous (not to mention incarcerated) for a serious but unsuccessful scheme to buy a nuclear submarine from a former Soviet naval officer and then use it to smuggle cocaine from Colombia.

Miami has a new criminal powerhouse knocking at its gates. Brighton Beach, New York is the only place in America with more Russian mobsters – the Mafiya, as it’s called. Thankfully, the Mafiya is nowhere near as well organized as La Cosa Nostra, but they are definitely here and growing stronger. With a little help from my law enforcement contacts, I was able to find a Ukrainian-born undercover agent who was willing to tell me all about it. One meeting with him, and I knew: There had to be a novel in this.

At the time, I was wrapping up a six-month investigation into the “dirty blood business.” I took an inside look at a company that, for profit, collected samples of diseased blood from drug addicts, the homeless, and anyone else who was willing to sell infected bodily fluids to medical research companies. I was surprised to find how loosely regulated this industry was, particularly when you consider that many specimens are collected from people with AIDS and other deadly diseases. It was this business side of terminal illness that started me in an even more intriguing direction: viatical settlements.