Omerta » (Abridged)

Lifelong New Yorker Mario Puzo drew upon figures in his Italian-American family to create the characters in his smash hit The Godfather in 1969; but he claimed never to have met a real-life mobster, and his detailed portrait of the Mafia world came entirely from diligent research.

THE FINAL CHAPTER IN MARIO PUZO'S LANDMARK MAFIA TRILOGY

Mario Puzo spent the last three years of his life writing Omerta, the concluding installment in his saga about power and morality in America. In The Godfather, he introduced us to the Corleones. In The Last Don, he told the wicked tale of the Clericuzios. In Omerta, Puzo chronicles the affairs of the Apriles, a family on the brink of legitimacy in a world of criminals.

Don Raymonde Aprile is an old man wily enough to retire gracefully from organized crime after a lifetime of ruthless conquest. Having kept his three children at a distance, he's ensured that they are now respectable members of the establishment: Valerius is an army colonel who teaches at West Point, Marcantonio is an influential TV network executive, and Nicole is a corporate litigator with a weakness for pro bono cases to fight the death penalty. To protect them from harm, and to maintain his entrée into the legitimate world ...

Trenton Times - David Walton

Omerta is great fun to read, the perfect summer novel...full of action and invention, written in the high earnestness and wicked playfulness of Puzo's best style. With sly intent, he recasts some of the themes and devices from his earlier novels...The dialogue, always a high point in Puzo's books, is crisp and deadpan caustic.