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
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
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