Sweet Mary. Liz Balmaseda. Atria. 256 pages. $24.95.

Former Miami Herald reporter and two-time Pulitzer winner Liz Balmaseda goes from star journalist to debut novelist with her sleek ripped-from-the-headlines Sweet Mary. The story she chooses as inspiration isn't related to her 1993 award-winning reportage on Miami's Haitian and Cuban refugees or the Elian Gonzalez saga, for which she earned a shared Pulitzer in 2001. Sweet Mary is inspired by a story Herald columnist Joan Fleischman covered in 2003, about a Kendall woman wrongly mistaken for a cocaine queen with a similar name.

Now with The Palm Beach Post, Balmaseda takes the bare bones of the mistaken-identity case and with confident, easy strokes, shows how quickly the life we each work to build can be ''smashed on the floor.'' But her heroine is not going to take that lying down. Dulce Maria (Sweet Mary) Guevara is 33, divorced, a devoted mom to 8-year-old Max and a Miami Realtor to be reckoned with.

''In just about every real estate deal there comes that critical moment when you've got to do the dance,'' Maria says. ''It's that do-or-die moment when the client is holding all the cards -- and both of you know it.'' Balmaseda makes palpable Maria's determination to dance, even pole dance, to close a condo deal or clear her name.

On a typical stifling August morning, Maria and Max are getting ready for their day when armed DEA agents storm in and arrest Maria, mistaking her for Colombian cartel queen Maria Guevara Portillo aka La Reina. ''I don't sell cocaine. I sell condominiums,'' Maria explains, but the officers shackle her, and in a scene evoking the INS agents' seizing of Elian Gonzalez, Florida Department of Children and Family Services agents take Max into custody. At the grimy federal detention center, Maria is interrogated, strip-searched and jailed. Her trial falls apart quickly, and the embarrassed DEA drops the case, but the nightmare isn't over. The local newspaper runs an article with the headline ``Realtor Released, but Evidence Murky, Feds Say.''

Meanwhile, Tony, her wily ex, leveraging doubts about Maria, is granted temporary custody of Max. Desperate, Maria embarks on a search for her alter ego, whom she comes to think of as Bad Mary.

Sweet Mary is a fast-paced odyssey that crisscrosses the state and involves Maria's feisty friend Gina, her suave but slimy ex Joe, the lost love of her life.

Despite her cast of characters, Balmaseda keeps the focus on her likeable heroine, who finally manages to track down La Reina in Malabar.

Maria has more at stake than her own good name; she wants her son back. And yet, Max never quite lifts off the page. In fact, no one comes alive quite like sweet Maria and Bad Mary. Still, Sweet Mary is a wild ride, not just for Maria but for the reader. If the finish feels too good to be true, that's because fiction often has the edge over journalism; you can have a happy ending. Sweet.

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

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