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
A treat for fans of The Evil Dead or Zombieland, complete with affordable solutions for better living.
A hardy band of big-box retail employees must dig down for their personal courage when ghosts begin stalking them through home furnishings.
You have to give it up for the wave of paranormal novels that have plagued the last decade in literature; at least they’ve made writers up their games when it comes to finding new settings in which to plot their scary moments. That’s the case with this clever little horror story from longtime pop-culture journalist Hendrix (Satan Loves You, 2012, etc.). Set inside a disturbingly familiar Scandinavian furniture superstore in Cleveland called Orsk, the book starts as a Palahniuk-tinged satire about the things we own—the novel is even wrapped in the form of a retail catalog complete with product illustrations. Our main protagonist is Amy, an aimless 24-year-old retail clerk. She and an elderly co-worker, Ruth Anne, are recruited by their anal-retentive boss, Basil (a closet geek), to investigate a series of strange breakages by walking the showroom floor overnight. They quickly uncover two other co-workers, Matt and Trinity, who have stayed in the store to film a reality show called Ghost Bomb in hopes of catching a spirit on tape. It’s cute and quite funny in a Scooby Doo kind of way until they run across Carl, a homeless squatter who's just trying to catch a break. Following an impromptu séance, Carl is possessed by an evil spirit and cuts his own throat. It turns out the Orsk store was built on the remains of a brutal prison called the Cuyahoga Panopticon, and its former warden, Josiah Worth, has returned from the dead to start up operations again. It sounds like an absurd setting for a haunted-house novel, but Hendrix makes it work to the story’s advantage, turning the psychological manipulations and scripted experiences that are inherent to the retail experience into a sinister fight for survival.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59474-526-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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