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
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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