Paradise City » (Unabridged, 9 Cassettes, 13 Hours)

Lorenzo Carcaterra is the author of Street Boys, Gangster, A Safe Place, and the New York Times bestsellers Sleepers and Apaches. He is a writer and producer for Law & Order, and has also written scripts for other television series and motion pictures.

The most exciting achievement to date from the acclaimed author of Sleepers and Gangster, Paradise City is a riveting thriller of two cops and two countries, a stunning crime novel about the roots of revenge, honor, and evil.
As a fifteen-year-old, Giancarlo Lo Manto learned about injustice the hard way. His father was gunned down by the Camorra, the murderous clan run by Don Nicola Rossi. When his mother moved him from New York back to his family’s ancestral home in Naples, Gian found himself face-to-face with the source of the mob’s strength, the spring that spawned its deadly killers.
Today, twenty-three years later, he is a dogged detective on the Naples police force, homicide division, the most dangerous beat in Europe. He is the nemesis of all who export evil, the man who stops it before it spreads overseas. His efforts have not gone unnoticed. “The strength of Naples reinforces the muscle of New York”–and now the two worlds are about to collide.
In the highest towers of the most expensive streets of New York City, Pete Rossi, the son of Don Nicola, has decided to bring Gian back to America–permanently. When Gian learns that his teenage niece, Paula, has gone missing in Manhattan, he cancels a much-needed vacation to Capri, to paradise, joking that “one island is just as good as the other.”
Gian’s homecoming will be anything but smooth. Someone must always watch his back, and Detective Jennifer Fabini gets the job. A gifted officer with her own personal demons, Jennifer thinks she’ll be dealing with a peasant from the old country. The handsome, reserved, unrelenting Gian is a revelation:an irritant and a temptation–especially for a woman who has sworn off cops as lovers. Together the two must solve a disappearance that appears to be a kidnapping . . . but turns out to be a deadly trap.
As they dash from the sun-struck villages of Italy to the darkest drug dens of New York, their journey links old-world honor and modern-day danger, and ends in a dizzying explosion of the present and the past. Paradise City is Lorenzo Carcaterra’s richest entertainment, a book that is at once a sensational crime novel and a provocative exploration of his trademark themes: violence and innocence, love and revenge.

Publishers Weekly

Carcaterra has written extensively for television and it shows in this melodramatic tale of war between the New York branch of the Italian Mafia and a lone, mob-busting supercop from Italy. Giancarlo Lo Manto has arrived from Naples on the trail of his recently kidnapped niece Paula, taken as bait for an assassination trap that Lo Manto must step into if he is to rescue the girl. Lo Manto's arch foe is Mafia boss Pete Rossi, a man so evil readers will sit wide-eyed as he coldly kills underling after underling with astonishing heartlessness. No one can doubt Carcaterra's firsthand knowledge of the mean streets of New York (see his bestselling memoir, Sleepers), his extensive vocabulary of cop-speak (Apaches) or his expertise regarding the city of Naples (Street Boys), but his made-for-TV writing may prove a stumbling block for more literary readers. Veteran cop-story aficionados will find that the eventual attraction between Lo Manto and partner Jennifer Fabini, detective daughter of NYPD legend Sal Fabini, comes as no surprise, and the connection between the cop and crime boss Rossi will garner few gasps. But those readers unafraid of a little purple in their prose (" `Get ready to taste it, cop,' the Squid said. `Get ready to die' ") will have a perfectly good time following Lo Manto and his unusual allies. Agent, Owen Laster. 5-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.