Road to Purgatory » (Unabridged)

Max Allan Collins is the author of the Shamus Award-winning Nathan Heller historical thrillers; his other books include the New York Times bestseller Saving Private Ryan and the bestselling CSI series. His comics writing ranges from the graphic novel Road to Perdition, source of the Tom Hanks film, to long runs as scripter of the “Dick Tracy” comic strip and his own innovative “Ms. Tree.” Collins is also a screenwriter and a leading Indie filmmaker. He lives in Iowa with his wife, writer Barbara Collins, and their son, Nathan.

It's 1942, and the young boy who accompanied his gangster father on the road has grown to manhood. After an idyllic upbringing in a small Midwestern town by loving adoptive parents, he finds himself in the jungles of Bataan, fighting the Japanese. Fearsome combat unearths deep-buried feelings of violence and revenge, and when Michael O'Sullivan returns to the homefront, a battle-scarred veteran at 22, he picks up his old war against the Capone mob, in Chicago. Suddenly, Michael "Satariano" must become one of the enemy, working his way quickly up to the trusted side of Frank Nitti himself -- and putting himself, and his soul, at risk. In a parallel tale set in 1922, Michael O'Sullivan, Sr., working for Irish godfather John Looney, is about to become a father; but the bidding of Looney, and the misdeeds of Looney's crazed son Connor, put his happy home at risk. The two Michael O'Sullivans reach a similar crossroads as the two tales converge in the purgatory of good men trapped in bad lives.

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This fine blood-drenched account of events before and after the action of Road to Perdition ranges from Bataan, the Philippines, in 1942, where Michael Satariano (né O'Sullivan) loses an eye in battle and earns a Congressional Medal of Honor, to Chicago in 1942 and 1943, where he goes undercover in the mob at the behest of Eliot Ness, to the Tri-Cities in 1922 and more O'Sullivan family history. Collins's customary bibliographic essay specifies what's real and what invented.