A highly satisfying story of family loyalty, persistence, courage, and crime.
A businessman resists the mob in a novel that spans most of the 20th century.
In 1915, Manhattan’s Lower East Side is a tough place for 12-year-old Morris Rabishevsky and his siblings to grow up. He takes a job sweeping floors at the Majestic Garment Company, but his drive and ambition are obvious. The owner suggests he go by Morris Raab—because Rabishevsky is “a mouthful for some people here”—and he and his mother agree. But street punks try to shake him down on payday, and he has to fight tough guy Louis Buchalter to keep his money. Morris has “never backed down from anything” and is much tougher than his brothers, Sol and Harold. Every character’s personal qualities factor strongly in this story. Morris’ drive and intelligence lead to his running Majestic at age 20 when the owner retires. Later, he and Sol start their own garment manufacturer, Raab Brothers. Morris’ brash approach wins business with a big chain store, and the company grows. Sol knows how to keep the books but doesn’t know how to sell. Their other brother, Harold, is a likable screw-up who hangs out with the wrong crowd, even mobsters, and might well ruin what becomes the family business. Louis Buchalter grows up to be a cutthroat mobster, taking over garment unions and running Murder Incorporated. The mob has a way of breaking down resistance to the unions: They throw a man out an eighth-floor window, splash an owner with sulfuric acid, destroy his inventory. Of course, the Raab Brothers’ success attracts Buchalter’s attention, and the resulting conflict is one of life and death. New York Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey seeks Morris’ cooperation in destroying the mob, but Morris and his business might perish in the process. At a funeral, a rabbi asks, “What does it mean to be a good man?” If it means standing up to evil, then Morris Raab qualifies.
A highly satisfying story of family loyalty, persistence, courage, and crime.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17998-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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