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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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