Pedophile politician's $150,000 bribery scheme
Saturday, Jan. 23 2010 @ 3:07PM
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Mafiya
By Charlie Stella
Pegasus Books, 305 pages
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The upside: As a producer of pure thrillers, Stella takes a back seat to no one. Mafiya is a non-stop bloodbath featuring Manhattan hits, corrupt cops, the bloodiest sex in literature and entire mob crews found floating in the bay. Its cast of characters are drawn for the dramatic -- nearly everyone's larger than life. As escapist crime fiction, this is a sprinting tale of gunfire and imaginative death the rarely lets up.
The downside: You'll have to quarantine your sense of reason. Agnes isn't just a former whore, but a cunning warrior without an inch of fear who naturally rejects the help of her ex-cop boyfriend so Stella can nakedly heighten the drama.
The Russian mob isn't just a bunch of goobers running white collar scams and extorting fellow immigrants. It has greater intelligence powers than the CIA and KBG combined, and can find anyone anywhere at a moment's notice. Most strange: They're perplexingly intent of killing every contact in Rachel's cell phone in a rather un-Mafia-like attempt to draw as much attention to themselves as possible.
Closing Arguments: If it's straight-up escapism you're looking for, it probably doesn't much better than this. But if you're the kind of reader that likes at least a trace of reality in your fiction, better to pass this by.
Grade: B-
In the last episode of Book Reviews: Box 21: A Swedish Sex Slave Thriller that Translates Well to American Readers.
Please, oh please don't try to compare Stella to Elmore Leonard. Maybe Leonard isn't your cup of tea -- but you have to give the guy respect. He's been writing smart, entertaining, creative crime fiction for decades now, and any crime writer will tell you that he's the man in the throne. Nobody does scumbags like Leonard. Nobody does dialogue like Leonard. Is he my favorite? No. I tend to prefer James Ellroy, Ken Bruen (at least his Jack Taylor series) and a few others. But hyping a book by immediately saying the author is better than Leonard is stretching it a bit.
Posted 01/25/2010 at 12:16:53 AMYou're probably right, Gaggy. I meant to say he's a better writer than Leonard, but I probably didn't phrase that well enough.
Posted 01/25/2010 at 10:02:43 AMMy favorite is George V. Higgins but I’ll be the first to attest to the fact I’m not in either his or Elmore Leonard’s league. Those guys were/are masters. I’m just a word processor ... staying out of trouble.
Posted 02/26/2010 at 04:12:38 PM