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This 2012 image released by Little, Brown and Company shows author Tom Wolfe. Wolfe, who wrote "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "The Right Stuff," returns with, "Back to Blood, his first novel in eight years. (AP Photo/Little, Brown and Company, Mark Seliger)

In "Back to Blood," Tom Wolfe tries to do for Miami what he did for New York in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and Atlanta in "A Man in Full." The result is a soapy, gripping, sometimes glib novel that's filled with heaps of contrivance and cartoonish antics, but that also stars two characters who attest to Wolfe's ability to conjure fully realized people.

Once again, he depicts a dog-eat-dog world in which people are scratching and clawing their way up the greasy social pole. Once again, he uses racial tensions and their political fallout to fuel his storyline. As in the past, Wolfe excavates the world of the superrich with cackling glee, reduces politicians to caricatures and mocks or eviscerates practically everybody else.

Among the specimens he nets are Sergei Korolyov, a swaggering Russian oligarch who has donated $70 million worth of Russian modernist paintings to a new Miami art museum; Edward T. Topping IV, a social-climbing WASP, who edits the Miami Herald; Lantier, a self-hating Haitian professor, who wants his daughter to pass as white; and Dr. Norman Lewis, a randy, loathsome psychiatrist who treats pornography addicts.

What pushes us past the sometimes simplistic satire in "Back to Blood" are Wolfe's main characters: Nestor Camacho, a heroic Cuban-American cop, who finds himself at the center of several race-based clashes that threaten to set off riots, and his former girlfriend Magdalena, an ambitious but good-hearted nurse who, after leaving him, finds herself in one dreadful relationship after another.

Although Wolfe mocks this pair for their ignorance and naivete, he also portrays them with genuine sympathy, using their idealism as a prism by which to view the pretensions, social climbing and Machiavellian manipulation that burble all around them. Nestor and Magdalena show that Wolfe has made advances in creating people who are not defined simply by their clothes, cars and verbal idiosyncrasies, but who actually possess an inner life.

Nestor, a likable Everyman, lives in a world defined by his Cuban immigrant parents' and grandparents' hopes and expectations. But his life is turned upside down after he uses his physical prowess to rescue a Cuban refugee who has climbed to the top of a schooner's mast in Biscayne Bay -- a rescue that enrages Miami Cubans, when the refugee ends up in the hands of the Coast Guard, facing the threat of deportation.

Magdalena gets sucked into the snooty Miami art world and finds herself falling for Korolyov -- the toast of the town thanks to his big museum donation -- at the very moment he has become the subject of a newspaper investigation into rumors that the paintings he gave are forgeries.

Wolfe doesn't really seem to care if his storyline becomes increasingly preposterous. His aim is to serve as an entertaining tour guide to the theme park-reality show that he calls Miami. Unlike his earlier novels, "Back to Blood" doesn't aspire to capture the zeitgeist of an era (i.e., the age of greed in "Bonfire," or the age of debt and doubt in "A Man in Full"). Rather, the novel is content to give us an impressionistic portrait of Miami as a city of immigrants, where ethnicity heightens class tensions, a city where Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Colombians, Russians and Israelis jostle one another to get a foot on the ladder of the American dream, while those above them try to scramble even higher.

Wolfe's mayor, Dionisio Cruz, tells the chief of police, "In Miami, everybody hates everybody" -- which pretty much sums up Wolfe's view of the city, and describes the motor powering his entertaining but flawed novel.

Little, Brown & Co.

$30, 704 pages