A Quiet Vendetta

When Catherine Ducane disappears in the hearth of New Orleans, the local cops react quickly – she is the daughter of the Governor of Louisiana after all. But the case gets very strange, very quickly. Her bodyguard turns up horribly mutilated in the trunk of a beautiful vintage car and when her kidnapper calls he doesn’t want money: he wants time alone with a minor functionary from a Washington-based organized crime task force.
Dragged down to the deep South, Ray Hartmann puzzles over why the mysterious kidnapper, an elderly Cuban named Ernesto Perez, wants to tell him his life story. It’s only when he realises that Ernesto has been a hitman for the Mob since the 1950s that things start to come together. But by the time the pieces fall into place, it’s already too late…