By NANCY PATE, The Orlando Sentinel

Summer in Miami, and the humidity soars with the temperature. The city bakes, swelters, steams. And writer Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's dark brown hair frizzes.

"My hair is my barometer," she says, laughing. "I can tell now it is plenty hot because my hair's all over the place. But I don't mind. Summer is good to me."

Especially this year, with the release of "One Hot Summer" (Rayo/Harper Collins, $23.95), her novel about a Cuban-American woman whose seemingly perfect world turns upside down when her first love re-enters the scene.

"It's a beach read, you know?" says the 52-year-old Cuban-American author best known for her popular series of mysteries starring Miami detective Lupe Solano. "I wanted to see if I could do something different, something lighter, more romantic. Because, really, I think I am a cynical person. Optimistic but cynical."

The cynicism may come from the 10 years she spent as a private investigator, operating her firm with a partner so she could learn the reality of the world she wanted towrite about fictionally.

"I became a private detective because I wanted to write private detective novels," says the 1972 Rollins College graduate, who also has an MBA from the University of South Florida. "The first thing you learn about being a private detective is that everybody lies. Your own clients lie to you -- or maybe they don't tell you the whole truth."

Duplicity also echoes through "One Hot Summer" when 35-year-old immigration lawyer Margarita Solana, happily married to another successful Cuban-American lawyer, picks up the phone and hears the voice of Luther Simmonds, the handsome Anglo she loved in law school. Until then the only cloud on Margarita's horizon was deciding whether to return to work after a year off caring for her young son Marco or acceding to the wishes of her husband and mother to stay home and have another baby.

"That's a real conflict for many Cuban-American women," says Garcia-Aguilera, the divorced mother of three daughters. "The older generation that was raised in Cuba is still very traditional. It's a generational conflict and a cultural conflict."

How Margarita, with the help of friends Vivian and Anabel -- along with a visit to a Coconut Grove shrine dedicated to Cuba's patron saint -- resolves her dilemmas is at the heart of "One Hot Summer."

"Life is messy," Garcia-Aguilera says. "Things are not cut and dried. Lines get blurred; compromises must be made."

Still, she doesn't want readers to get the impression that "One Hot Summer" is too, well, serious.

"Oh, I had such fun writing this book," she says. "Mysteries are very labor-intensive because you have to plot so carefully. This was much more free-flowing. I had done six Lupe novels, and I needed a break. I liked coming up with new characters."

She's especially fond of Margarita's pal Anabel, an architect who can't wear contact lenses but is too vain to wear glasses in public. She's also colorblind ("So am I but not that bad," says her creator), and her colorful clothes tend to clash rather than coordinate. In one scene in the novel, Margarita describes Anabel wearing several shades ofyellow and "looking like a demented chicken who had escaped from an Easter basket."

"One Hot Summer" is one of four books being published this summer under the Rayo imprint that HarperCollins started last fall.

"It's a platform for the Hispanic American experience in the United States," says HarperCollins spokesman Alberto Rojas. "We publish 12 titles a year, both fiction and nonfiction. 'One Hot Summer' is about a Cuban-American woman, but another of our new titles, Stella Pope Duarte's novel 'Let Their Spirits Dance,' focuses on theMexican-American experience."

In a preview of "One Hot Summer," Publishers Weekly praised the "zesty" tale, noting that "Garcia-Aguilera perfectly captures the conflicts of these cosseted
Cuban-American women. Her tongue-in-cheek humor enlivens the situations she describes with intimate familiarity."

But Library Journal was dismissive, calling the book "disappointing ... with unbelievable plotting straight out of a daytime soap opera."

Garcia-Aguilera, in turn, is dismissive of the review. "I didn't set out to cure cancer," she says. "It's just a fun book."

She's been having fun, too, writing another book this summer, a thriller about a Cuban family in Las Vegas. It wasn't until a recent trip to the Nevada city that she realized it had such a large Cuban population, one that dates back to 1959, when the casinos in Cuba were closed.

"So all these families who had been involved in the casinos ended up in Las Vegas," she says. "That gave me the idea."

The change in setting, too, means she'll need to leave Miami's tropical warmth for Las Vegas' desert heat at least one more time.

"You are not going to believe this," she confides, laughing again. "But I have to go back. My daughter's dog ate my research."