Fort Lauderdale Police Detective Valarie Garibaldi is celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday when a sniper murders a Cuban finance minister in a nearby condominium. Upon investigating the shooting, Detective Garibaldi uncovers millions of dollars in fifties in the dead man’s apartment…all of it counterfeit. Castro’s Pelican pits the detective and best shot in the State of Florida against a Chinese sharpshooter who has the detective on his list of targets. Valarie is a cancer survivor who's lost her ovaries and her hair, and has decided to stay with a crewcut, seeking a low maintenance lifestyle. Her mother died in childbirth and her father, a twenty-five-year veteran of both Newark and Fort Lauderdale PD, was shot and killed on the job, the day before she graduated high school, two days after her eighteenth birthday. Now, at twenty-nine, she’s living his dream.