SWEATY PALMS

1980; it was a simpler time, that is, unless you lived in Miami, Florida. Rioting in the streets, drug smuggling, gang warfare and political corruption were an everyday part of life in Miami during those turbulent times. Brian Leopold’s novel Sweaty Palms follows television news producer Kevin Corrigan, through the sweltering Miami heat as he undertakes the tense search for a missing four-year-old. The book, the first in a new mystery series, is a riveting, yet quirky novel combining equal parts of suspense and humor into a real page-turning gumbo of South Florida intrigue.

Campbell LaRoche, the four-year-old granddaughter of the University of Florida’s head football coach has mysteriously vanished from her Ft. Lauderdale bedroom, just days before one of the biggest games in history. The little girl’s disappearance horrifies even crime-jaded Miami and, more than a year after the crime, the trail has gone completely cold. When Corrigan, who has never investigated a crime before, agrees to help investigate Miami’s highest profile cold case, he finds himself unexpectedly plunged head-first into a world of mobsters, Columbian drug lords, washed-up football superstars and con men.

Corrigan’s investigation is complicated by a most disconcerting personality quirk, his nearly uncontrollable compulsion to say whatever comes into his mind. As he explains it, “That little man inside your head who says ‘I wouldn’t say that if I were you?’ Inside my head, he’s gagged and tied to a chair.” This odd personality disorder serves Kevin well in a television newsroom, where deadline pressures put a premium on speaking your mind and doing it in a hurry, but it immensely complicates his life as an investigator. As the story unfolds, Corrigan enlists his own army of assistants to help unravel the crime, including a Special Forces commando, the one-time Queen of Burlesque and professional wrestling’s former world champion.

Corrigan’s search for the missing girl takes him and his crew the length and breadth of Florida and along the way he discovers that the kidnapping is only the tip of the iceberg in a series of crimes that constantly turn the investigation in a new and more twisted direction.