Thy Father's Son
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
New York City, October 1962: The Cuban missile crisis threatens the world as a drug war consumes the mafia. Caught up in its midst is Davey Rossi, former lightweight champion and son of Mafia don Vince Rossi. As Davey trains for his comeback to regain the title, he learns of a secret kept by Vince and his brother Johnny--a betrayal that split the Rossi family and caused its tragic involvement in the long-buried wars between the Jewish and Italian gangsters of the 1920's and 30's.
The past and its deadly mystery force Davey to enter the violent life he has tried to avoid. He is pitted against ambitious, cunning Mafiosi steeped in guile and treachery. Davey searches for Dolly Irving, the reclusive stage star of the 1920's who knew the mobsters of that glamorous, roaring decade. And he falls in love with Julie Alpert, a beautiful tax attorney whose covert agenda threatens to bring down the Rossi family.
Told in a pitch-perfect voice, with a rich and varied cast, and set against the backdrop of the Kennedy brothers' vendetta against the Mafia, Thy Father's Son is a stunning novel of family loyalty, redemption, and the sins of the past that can only be expiated by vengeance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The son of an Italian New York mafia don finds out he's Jewish in Leo Rutman's unusual novel of American organized crime and cultural identity. Set in 1962, Thy Father's Son is the story of Davey Rossi, a prizefighter and scion of an important syndicate family who finds out that he's actually the adopted, orphaned son of a murdered Jewish mobster and his showgirl moll. Furthermore, his adoptive father took part in the hit on his biological one. The stunned Rossi tries to track down his mother and find out the real story of the gangland machinations behind his father's death while becoming embroiled in vendettas of his own; along the way, Rutman reveals much about the heyday of Jewish organized crime, as well as the evolution of the Italian-American mafia in the 1960s. The book's first-person narration and dialogue can be stiff, but Rutman's original, intricate plot and well-researched historical details make up for the shortcomings of his prose.
