Pun Salad

Mr. Frank Machianno spends the first 39 pages of this book going about his normal everyday routine, and we learn he has an ex-wife, a girlfriend, an adored daughter about to enter med school, an impressive number of business ventures at which he works diligently and honestly, with a straightforward sense of fair play.

Fine, but boring in its Proustian detail. Read through this as fast as you possibly can.

His life starts to unravel on page 40, though. It turns out that Frank is also known as "Frankie Machine", and his cohorts in the San Diego area mob are demanding his attention once more. They make him an offer he can't refuse; just when he thought he was out they pull him back in. (And, yes, he muses on the effect the Godfather movies have had on the actual mob.) And so the bodies start piling up.

Winslow's a very good depictor of the world of organized crime, suspense, and violent action. He does a good job here of creating a hero out of a mob hitman, whose sense of honor and ethics (like: never whack guys in a situation where civilians might be hurt) is, to put it mildly, unshared by all his colleagues. If you can buy that, you'll have a pretty good time reading this.