Cut Numbers » (1st Back Bay Paperback Edition)

A journalist who has also written three novels, Nick Tosches is an acclaimed biographer whose unconventional books -- Dino and The Devil and Sonny Liston among them -- illuminate some of America's more controversial, overshadowed talents.

This Mafia thriller is familiar with the darkest chambers of the human heart, with a wildly elastic prose style. It unravels the Mafia that only insiders know—the messy day-to-day business of violent crime, pornography, gambling, and extortion.

Publishers Weekly

Making his fiction debut, Tosches, a rock journalist (Hellfire), strikes gold with a brutal, corrosively funny portrait of New York's penny-ante hoods and professional lowlifes. Louie Brunellesches, a thuggish loan shark who can't even make a dishonest living, spends his days shaking down his sparse clientele, brooding about his estranged girlfriend Donna and drunkenly dreaming of just one big payoff. Out in Newark, his ancient Uncle Giovanni, a one-time big shot in Harlem's numbers game, plots a final blow against a crafty old racketeer known as Il Capraio. Meanwhile, Joe Brusher, a human death machine, is rapidly cutting a gory swath through the local underworld. Tosches's prose crackles with violence, degradation and reams of cheerful obscenity, but he has a sociologist's eye for the squalid territory of his characters, an unerring ear for their banter and invective, and affection for their mutated traditions and warped loyalties. (July)