LEVERAGE

Just because the Chicago mob has already used a man up and spit him out doesn’t mean they can’t use him again.

Back in the day, Frank Via was a trusted mob lawyer. But his success in getting his clients off after Operation Monkey Wrench led to his disbarment. Now, he works with his often unpaid associate Nicky Fratelli to eke out a living as a private eye. Via, already in debt to loan shark Charlie Pignotti, can’t afford to turn down jobs, but there’s one he wants no part of: finding Annette Brassi, the 17-year-old daughter of Tina Brassi, who took off with her much older boyfriend after copying the financial records of Tina’s ex, mob boss Tony Brassi, onto a thumb drive. The boyfriend, Tommy Getti, has already been found dead, and Via’s eager to stay out of the line of fire between Brassi and his stepdaughter. But his refusal simply forestalls the inevitable. Soon, he’s facing Brassi himself, who’s much less willing to take no for an answer. Poking around quickly persuades Via that a full-scale war among the heads of Chicago’s three leading criminal families—Brassi, Al Salerno and the aged Carmine Delacante—is just around the corner and that both of Brassi’s rivals would love to have the latest facts and figures on his organization. Via’s investigations provoke such wholesale violence that readers may forget for long stretches that he’s supposed to be looking for Annette Brassi. And the body count, whose numbers rival those of the national debt, prevents any one mobster from emerging as an individual before he’s riddled with bullets.

Too many mobsters, too many corpses—most of them mobsters—too many plot twists that cancel each other out: Doeden (The Crux Ansata, 2010), who writes a mean scene, offers much too much here.