Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 3.4 / 5.0

Reads like nonfiction:

This is one of the best crime thrillers I've read, and I think that's because it reads like nonfiction -- there's strong emotion and character development, but it's told through the action, the culture, and the settings, not so much by getting into the individual characters' heads. I couldn't put this book down. Tosches' Lower Manhattan locales -- Chinatown, Little Italy -- are right on: gritty, rich with character and history, uniquely beautiful and scary at once. The characters are not-so-loosely based on... more info

At 450 pages too long:

This had to be one of the most boring books that I have ever read. At 450 pages it seemed like 1,500. The characters are unsympathetic and who lives, who dies, by the time the book is over you don't care anymore. The author uses Italian phrases throughout the book and after the first 10 or 20 it gets especially annoying. I thought that after reading "Dino" I would give Tosches another try. No more.

An Unusually Intelligent Crime Novel:

What we have here is basically well-dressed pulp fiction (which, incidentally, I mean as a compliment). Not everyone, especially these days, may enjoy Tosches' iconoclastic embrace of the grotesque, but those who like their humor dark & their narratives darker certainly will. Stylistically, the prose runs to the pretentious at times ("a tumescense that was more than urethral"? Please.), but is generally lyrical & pleasing. Definitely an above-average piece of genre fiction.

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