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
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
