The transfer - Thomas Palmer

The cocaine business is no place for amateurs and Ray Hula was no man for smuggling. He was the middle aged owner of a marine salvage company in Miami who kept himself to himself and his trading business strictly legal - at least until his half-brother Michael came on the scene.

They had only met once before and disliked each other on sight; now Michael had a ton of cocaine to dispose of, and Ray disliked him even more. But Michael needed Ray's help, and what Michael needed he generally got. 

A ton of cocaine worth $10 m to the Colombian operators who controlled the trade, but they would have begrudged paying 10 cents to a couple of outsiders invading their tightly run guarded empire. 

Michael devised a perversely ingenious scheme for trading the cocaine against the money and making a clean getaway, but the Colombians soon picked up the trail. Harried by the forces of law and order, hotly pursued by the still more alarming forces of organized crime, Michael and Ray were on the run. Inexorably the enemy closed in, the chances of survival dwindled, until a supremely ingenious twist provoked the final crisis.

Intricately plotted, richly peopled, astonishingly mature, The Transfer introduces a brilliant new talent to the world of thriller writing.