A fast-paced mob-family saga with compelling characters, great dialogue, and hardboiled vengeance.
In Florio’s crime novel set in the 1970s, gangsters pursue a young couple and fight among themselves.
As the story opens, it’s 1973 and J.J. Mesagne has just fled the scene of a gangland shootout in Wheeling, West Virginia, involving his father. He travels across the country with a stolen dog named Gnocchi to Scottsdale, Arizona, where he meets up with his mother, Maria Jenkins, and Leslie Fitzpatrick, the girl carrying his baby. Leslie also happens to be the mistress of Paul Verbania, West Virginia’s main mob boss. The three soon learn that J.J.’s father has been executed as a reprisal for the couple’s relationship. J.J. assumes a false name and starts working at a hospital in an effort to keep a low profile, but it isn’t long before he arouses the suspicions of Billy, a local man with organized crime connections. Before long, J.J. realizes he must decide between doing the unthinkable or continuing to run. Back in West Virginia, Paul’s crew, led by the menacing Vinny, are taking the search national: Anyone who finds J.J., and sends his severed hand to them as proof that he’s dead, will receive a sizable reward. Meanwhile, Jimmy Dacey, the 72-year-old best friend of J.J.’s father, is infiltrating the West Virginia mob; he starts working with Vinny’s crew and learns that there’s dissension in the ranks over whether to keep pursuing J.J. Jimmy hatches a plan to take down the bad guys and set J.J. free for good.
Over the course of the novel, Florio presents a mob drama that spans years before delivering a satisfying conclusion that ties all the various plot threads together. Right from the exciting opening—which starts in the middle of the action, leaving readers unsure of who was just shot, whom we should trust, or what exactly is in J.J.’s immediate future—readers will be eagerly turning pages as Florio fills them in on past and future events. The cast of characters is large, and several are the focus of individual chapters, told from their first-person point of view. This device could have offered an intriguing patchwork of perspectives, but it’s not entirely successful in its execution; they often feel too similar in style, and the cutting back-and-forth between different points of view slows some exciting action sequences. Despite this, Florio’s characters are well drawn and engaging. He has a flair for dialogue that keeps the plot moving, as in punchy exchanges between Vinny and his dimwitted crew, or between J.J. and his sharp-tongued mother, as when he tells her it’s his duty to get revenge: “‘Duty my ass.’ Maria smacked a hand against her backside as she said it. ‘Your only duty is to take care of this family. If you don’t come back, where does that leave us?’” The plot treads familiar territory for the genre, but the inclusion of Maria and Jimmy as elders with their own agendas, romances, and doubts feels fresh.
A fast-paced mob-family saga with compelling characters, great dialogue, and hardboiled vengeance.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798987944042
Page Count: 400
Publisher: PFT Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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