A routine hit for the Chicago Outfit erupts in a salvo of violence and stupidity as the survivors scurry to protect themselves from each other and race the cops for an all-important witness. Capo Aldo Forte has asked his buddy Joe-Sep Alessi to bring in a pair of wiseguys from New Jersey to lean on Manny Peters, a soldier who hijacked a kilo of coke. Joe-Sep sends along rising star Angelo Franconi, his daughter's new boyfriend, to keep an eye on the proceedings, and what an eyeful Angelo gets: While the wiseguys are taking care of Manny, Angelo catches sight of a potential witness and points him out to the killers, who duly whack him too. But the dead witness was only a kid, a 13-year-old named Rayfield Tees whose cause is promptly taken up by rabble-rousing alderman Rev. Lorenz Hunter and ambitious reporter Holly Stokes. Word leaks out that Rayfield's murder was witnessed by his girlfriend, Latrona Meek, who's vanished from under the noses of the task force headed by homicide cop Franco Norelli and burned-out Violent Crimes veteran Joe Morrison (State Street, 1991). All this puts Angelo in a very delicate position, because he's really an FBI informant who can't afford to blow his cover. As Morrison negotiates with a dead-eyed drug lord for information about Latrona's whereabouts, Joe-Sep's lieutenant, Jimmy Pagnano, is engaged in an equally distasteful deal with witless out-of-towner Vaughn Swayze to supply a corpse for a fly-by-night insurance scam- -laying the groundwork for a ghoulish surprise when this subplot finally hooks up to Angelo's frantic attempts to cover himself while he's tying up all the loose ends for Joe-Sep. The plotting is dogged and overelaborate, like Joseph Wambaugh after a sleepless night, but Whittingham's Chicago backgrounds are as richly reeking as ever.
Pub Date: June 30, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-358-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
O'Brien proves to be the Oliver Stone of literature, reiterating the same Vietnam stories endlessly without adding any insight. Politician John Wade has just lost an election, and he and his wife, Kathy, have retired to a lakeside cabin to plan their future when she suddenly disappears. O'Brien manages to stretch out this simple premise by sticking in chapters consisting of quotes from various sources (both actual and fictional) that relate to John and Kathy. An unnamed author — an irritating device that recalls the better-handled but still imperfect "Tim O'Brien" narrator of The Things They Carried (1990) — also includes lengthy footnotes about his own experiences in Vietnam. While the sections covering John in the third person are dry, these first-person footnotes are unbearable. O'Brien uses a coy tone (it's as though he's constantly whispering "Ooooh, spooky!"), but there is no suspense: The reader is acquainted with Kathy for only a few pages before her disappearance, so it's impossible to work up any interest in her fate. The same could be said of John, even though he is the focus of the book. Flashbacks and quotes reveal that John was present at the infamous Thuan Yen massacre (for those too thick-headed to understand the connection to My Lai, O'Brien includes numerous real-life references). The symbolism here is beyond cloying. As a child John liked to perform magic tricks, and he was subsequently nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his fellow soldiers — he could make things disappear, get it? John has been troubled for some time. He used to spy on Kathy when they were in college, and his father's habit of calling the chubby boy "Jiggling John" apparently wounded him. All of this is awkwardly uncovered through a pretentious structure that cannot disguise the fact that there is no story here. Sinks like a stone.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 061870986X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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