An engrossing, solidly entertaining organized-crime story with a few twists.
In this suspenseful crime novel, tensions rise between the Albanian and Italian mafias on the streets of New York.
Two powerful criminal organizations—the Albanian Marku family and the Italian Miceli family—maintain an uneasy coexistence in the neighborhood along Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Aided by its fearsome reputation, the Albanian mob has been making inroads into rackets previously controlled by the Micelis, who, after a loss in recent decades of traditional values like loyalty and silence, have been decimated by the FBI. The groups are headed by Ilir Marku and Carmine Miceli, a pair of old-fashioned patriarchs—Godfather-type figures guided by honor, tradition, and caution. But when Ilir Marku’s son is killed in a rooftop drug deal gone bad, reports that an Italian man may be responsible threaten to ignite a war between the two families. It could be the start of a blood feud the Albanians call gjakmarrja: a pursuit of vengeance that can lead to the targeting of a whole family’s worth of male relatives. Gino Ranno, a real estate developer and family friend of the suspected shooter, tries to save the suspect’s life by working his extensive criminal connections. Accustomed to being around gangsters but unprepared for the level of violence he must face, Gino is closest to being the novel’s protagonist, although Romano adeptly juggles an assortment of other major characters as well. Carlo Del Greco, the veteran detective working the case (in the pay of the Markus), finds himself playing a double game as he tries to solve the murder case while also reporting to benefactors who have little interest in the finer, lawful points of the criminal justice system. The prose sometimes dips into cliché, but Romano keeps the pacing tight. He also displays a keen ear for dialogue and a sharp eye for small details, whether in the fast-paced violence and confusion of a street gunfight or at a Bronx safe house decked out in plastic-covered living room furniture, ornate chandeliers, and prisonlike iron bars on the windows and doors.
An engrossing, solidly entertaining organized-crime story with a few twists.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1467923033
Page Count: 332
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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