GANGSTERS DON'T DIE

In the third and final installment of Goldberg's sardonic series about a prolific Chicago hit man posing as a Las Vegas rabbi, the mobster's dual identity begins to fall apart.

His surgically altered face pulverized by a sucker punch at a bar mitzvah, Sal Cupertine's disguise as Rabbi David Cohen is badly compromised. Bizarrely, he now resembles his former self, even under a beard. With FBI agents present and past gunning for him, along with old adversary Peaches Pocotillo, the new Native American head of the Chicago mob, he needs all the protection he can get. After Peaches burns down Sal's house in the Windy City and has ousted Family boss Ronnie Cupertine's wife and kids cut up and left in trash bags, Sal fears for the safety of his long unseen family, in protective custody somewhere. He once flirted with moral uplift after reading and quoting the Torah to become a passable rabbi: "The longer he pretended to be a rabbi, the better at being a rabbi he became." But that was four years ago. Now asked whether he has any problem with killing, he says, "None at all." While Goldberg continues to redefine hard-boiled with his streaming profanity and ripe intellectualism, he and his protagonist seem to lose interest in Sal/David's split personality. The murderous rabbi's inability to do wrong with his adoring flock in Vegas speaks to today's moral climate, but the comedic sparks that made Gangsterland (2014), the first novel in the series, so entertaining are in short supply. A sprawling effort with gratuitous elements including a cadaver farm of embalmed heads and other body parts, this book misses the concision of Goldberg's brilliant collection, The Low Desert (2021).

An eventful but overstuffed finale.