Miami Beach author Gerald Posner is known for plunging into a juicy investigation the way a pit bull goes after bloody meat.

He can be obsessive, relentless. So can his wife Trisha, who researches alongside him. It helps that Posner was a Wall Street lawyer for a time. There is no impenetrable pile of court records that can put him off.

Good for his readers, who have been treated to bestsellers such as Case Closed, which supports the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Why America Slept, about al-Qaeda terrorists. Not so good for his subjects, who rarely get off easy. His latest work, Miami Babylon, Crime, Wealth, and Power -- A Dispatch from the Beach (Simon & Schuster, $27) will be released Tuesday.

But for weeks now, some local players have been on edge, reaching out to those who have received early copies of the book to ask, ``What does it say about me?''

Posner, who will read from Babylon Tuesday night at Books & Books on Lincoln Road, says there were to be two parties to celebrate the launch of his book, but both were scrapped when the hosts actually read the thing. He says star developer Jorge Perez, who comes up in several chapters, had offered to throw a party at his showcase Icon Brickell toward the end of October.

``Then I got a note that said that Jorge had seen a copy of the book, didn't like what I said about him and that the party was off,'' says Posner, chief investigative reporter for The Daily Beast, an online news aggregator. ``I'm not quite sure what part he didn't like. He was one of the few people who made himself accessible repeatedly. He was always open, always gracious. He provided documents, pictures.''

Publicist Tara Solomon also canceled a party after she read what Posner wrote about Al Malnik, father of her old friend and client Shareef Malnik, who years ago took over the running of the family's landmark Forge restaurant.

The elder Malnik has forever denied rumors that he had ties to Meyer Lansky and the mob, but Posner comes up with some juice based on court files and other records.

``It is unfortunate that the book omitted the last 20 years of The Forge's substantial culinary, social, civic and charitable contributions to the city of Miami Beach,'' said Shareef, who has been traveling, in a statement provided by Solomon's office. ``Instead, the focus was unsubstantiated innuendo and rumor, the sole purpose of which, I can only assume, was to sell books.''

``I'm very fond of Gerald and I respect him so much as a writer,'' says Solomon, who figures in the section about the South Beach renaissance, when she was The Miami Herald's ``Queen of the Night'' columnist. Posner describes how she required ``coif clearance'' in those days, keeping her car's sunroof open so that her tall hairdos could poke through.

``When I got to the chapter about Al Malnik, I said, `I certainly can't do this party.' Shareef Malnik is like family to me,'' Solomon says. ``Gerald totally understood my position. There were no hard feelings either way.''

THE TREATMENT

No doubt, there will be others who won't be thrilled to have received the Posner treatment. Perhaps developer Don Peebles will cringe when he reads Posner's detailing of the politics he played as he was revamping the Royal Palm Hotel and the Bath Club. There's also the bit about Peebles' ties to Marion Barry, and, according to the book, evidence revealed that ``the mayor had taken girls to Peebles' flat'' in Washington, D.C.

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