Greaves’ impressive research illuminates many aspects of this long-ago legal spectacular. Yet he achieves his most telling...
A novel of mobsters, madams, and manipulative lawyers in 1930s New York.
Greaves, who when using “Chuck” as his byline specializes in hard-boiled legal thrillers set in Southern California, publishes under his statelier moniker this fact-based, multilayered historical novel about the 1936 trial of Salvatore Lucania, aka Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the most powerful crime boss in America, who was charged with, and later convicted on, 62 counts of compulsory prostitution. The aforementioned layers are separate narratives, each with a distinctive tone and point of view, which are woven together to show how the destinies of four very different, driven people converged at that trial and were, to varying degrees, transformed by it. Chief among them is “Charlie Lucky” himself, who achieves his reputation—and his nickname—through a potent combination of hooded-eyed menace, coldblooded pragmatism, and an implacable aptitude for survival. Such gifts enable Luciano to outlast and outwit any and all challengers to his unofficial title of “boss of bosses” until he meets his most formidable (and unlikely) foe: Thomas E. Dewey, the young, prim, baritone-voiced special prosecutor, whose ruthless pursuit of Luciano’s conviction, if successful, could propel him to the governor’s mansion—and, quite possibly, beyond. Opposing Dewey is Luciano’s lawyer, George Morton Levy, an astute Long Island litigator whose meticulousness in preparation is often countered by a gambler’s attraction to the big risk. (“I never seem to know when to quit while I’m ahead,” he confesses to a colleague after a rare loss.) Last and certainly not least is one of the prosecution’s star witnesses: Cokey Flo Brown, a heroin addict and recidivist prostitute, who, despite showing the physical and emotional effects of a rough-and-tumble life, “is brassy and shrewd, with a wharf rat’s instinct for self-preservation.” Hers is the testimony that turns the tide against Luciano to the point where Levy reluctantly lets his client testify on his own behalf, “with foreseeably disastrous results”
Greaves’ impressive research illuminates many aspects of this long-ago legal spectacular. Yet he achieves his most telling effects with his imaginative renderings of the eponymous quartet—especially Lucky and Cokey Flo, though you wish there were some more of George.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-785-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
