Entertaining Mafia reprise, written by the pseudonymous Girard while serving a seven-year prison sentence for racketeering. Like Girard, his hero Mickey Boy Messina is out on parole after servingin Mickey's casesix years. Prison has not dimmed Mickey's ardor to be a made man in the Mafia. But then the blood of his Sicilian fathers runs deep in Mickey, who does not know that he's the illegitimate son of top boss Don Vicenze Calabra. Don Vicenze himself has a dream: to condense the five Mafia families into two and make the ``blood of our fathers'' strong again. Unfortunately, this calls for much mayhem as big-time mafiosi and their underbosses, captains, soldiers and associates are shipped to the next world by way of a huge wave of assassinations and reprisals. Mickey Boy's problems are with his smart, sexy girlfriend Laurel and seem much like Michael Corleone's with Kay: Laurel doesn't want Mickey as long as he remains in the mob. She's eyeing Florida and a fresh start. Mickey's problems are doubled by his half-brother Little Vinnie Calabra, a slobbering wimp with delusions of grandeur, who knows that Don Vincenze is secretly grooming Mickey to be top boss, although Mickey doesn't know this, or that Vinnie's his half- brother. Vinniewho has the hots for Laurelhas made three failed his on Mickey; in fact, it was Vinnie who first noted a certain look-alike quality with Mickey and had him set up to take the fall for himself: Mickey did six years for Vinniebut also for Don Vicenze. Meanwhile, Mickey's widowed mother Connie is back in town and crossing paths with her old lover Don Vicenze, himself now a widower. As the lead flies, both Connie and Don Vincenze try to convince Laurel that life with her beloved Mickey will be okay because the Family is going legit and getting out of the rackets. This long first installmenta sequel is underwayends with Mickey assuming top spot. Strong storytelling that lacks the originality of The Godfather but has many writerly touches and a wonderful bloom of authenticity.
Pub Date: June 4, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-72740-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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