A legal thriller that thrusts a garden-variety attorney into the world of Argentinian organized crime.

Dennis Brunt is a low-ranking tax lawyer at his firm, so he’s surprised when he’s pulled into a major case and given a central role in it. It turns out that Gerhard Schmidt, a shady figure from the criminal underworld who’s under investigation for illegal arms trading, drug trafficking, and money laundering, personally asked for his involvement. It’s a peculiar request, as Brunt hasn’t been around long enough to make a name for himself. The attorney soon learns that both he and Schmidt are Argentinian; Brunt was sent away by his mother to the United States 30 years earlier, and he never returned or saw his mother again. Now he’s compelled to fly back to Argentina to learn about Schmidt’s business, and his client locates Brunt’s mother and orchestrates an emotional reunion. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Brian Hannigan, doggedly pursues Schmidt’s prosecution, which sets Brunt in his cross hairs. In a subplot, Brunt starts to fall for an FBI agent who’s covertly investigating him, and their relationship becomes ever more complex as the connection between Brunt and Schmidt comes into sharper focus. Debut author Mankus, like his protagonist, is an attorney, so he writes with professional confidence and expertise. But although this is a brief novella, it’s overly crammed with parallel plotlines, and, as a result, it only fully develops Brunt’s character. More than just a legal thriller, this is also a complex family drama and a love story, and these latter narrative lines sometimes seem to extend beyond Mankus’ comfort zone as a writer. For example, when Brunt meets his estranged brother for the first time, he delivers this wooden line: “ ‘You’re my long-lost brother,’ Dennis said, ‘and I missed you very much.’ ” However, the author is adept at vividly depicting violent action, and the story’s pace is entertainingly relentless. There’s no shortage of unexpected twists, too, which will keep readers hungry for the next page.

This brief adventure’s power comes more from its mystery than its characterization. 

In his debut memoir, Mankus traces his origins as a refugee from war-torn Lithuania during the waning years of World War II, when Russian occupation grimly loomed like the German bombardment that preceded it.

Mankus’ narrative reveals the devastating changes forced on Lithuanian families in the early 1940s, when they measured the benefits of escaping oppression against the inestimable costs of leaving behind their homes, culture and traditions. Mankus uses a direct, unadorned style, sometimes heartbreaking in its simplicity, as in the brief yet poignant scene of his mother giving her beloved cow a kiss goodbye. His tragedy, and that of the many others who fled their homes for squalid displaced-person camps, needs no adornment. The book follows his circuitous path from one such camp to a hardscrabble childhood in New Jersey, where his family settled, then through several false starts in his attempts to make a life for himself as an adult. The pacing can be problematic, however: The story, a strictly chronological account of Mankus’ life, gives equal or disproportionate weight to moments big and small. His father’s imprisonment on manslaughter charges, for running over a man with a military truck while driving drunk, is presented as an aside, but Mankus’ later work as a tax collector for the IRS, which he describes as tedious and mundane, takes up several chapters. And the abrupt, declarative style that works well in describing the atrocities of war comes across as terse and choppy in tender moments, such as his mother’s death: “She died October 10, 1988. She was eighty-two. She’d had a hard life.” At times, the thread that binds the narrative together—Mankus’ struggle to derive identity and meaning from the brutality of his early experiences—is abandoned, leaving readers craving more reflection and deeper insight.

A striking firsthand account of war and the disorientation of the immigrant experience, told candidly and without self-pity by a narrator who has yet to make meaning of it all.