Just because you’ve been contracted by the Mafia doesn’t mean you may not end up in their crosshairs. It’s only business.
Not this time.
When Michael Schaeffer lost his parents when he was about 12, the local butcher took him in. The butcher was reasonably successful at his craft who took really good care of his best customers, the wives in particular. He taught Michael his ways and brought him up to be the best. In this case, the best was not as a meat cutter, but the best in the butcher’s part-time job – contract killer.
And Michael flourished. He scored his first kill at 16 and by 19 he was an independent contractor whose main employers were the various Mafia families who hired him to take out folks who had wronged the family no matter if the target was inside or outside La Cosa Nostra.
But, one lesson Michael learned was that business partners don’t cross each other. When one boss makes the unfortunate decision to have Michael snuffed after a job, Michael takes it personally. He kills an enemy of the boss, cuts off the head, hands, and feet for burial on said boss’s horse farm in upstate NY. Then calls the FBI and tips them off to the burial, landing the boss in prison for life.
Frank Tosca is a ruthless underboss in the old vein of Don’s back in the day. After about 10 years of the mob floundering around with his boss in prison, Frank is convinced that if the other crime families agree with him to kill The Butcher’s Boy (as he’s known by the mob), by doing so will give him the power to rise to the absolute boss of all the families. He arranges a meeting of the main 25 family heads at a dude ranch outside of Phoenix.
Frank had sent a couple slugs looking for Michael, finding him married and living near Bath, UK. Michael is none too pleased, kills them easily, and learns Tosca is behind the kill order. Michael heads back to the US and starts to track down Tosca, but has been out of the game for a decade and wants to know the current hierarchy, so he contact the Justice Dep’t organized crime wonk, Elizabeth Waring, who first deduced his existence about 20 years ago.
She doesn’t give him much, preferring to bring him in as an informant, which he declines. He whacks the next guys up the Tosca chain, a couple right under the noses of the Feds, and learns of the desert meeting. He arrives to find the 25 bosses surrounded by about 200 soldiers. He sneaks in (all those young soldiers had never seen him, only heard tales. It has been a while since he was active), learns of the consensus by the bosses, follows Tosca to his cottage, cuts his throat, and slips out past the coming FBI takedown of the conference; Waring found out where it was being held, too.
Michael finds out the mob is really pissed off. Now it's personal.
A normal guy might slink off to parts unknown, but Michael has decided to convince the mob that it is too dangerous to hunt him down and systematically crisscrosses the country taking out the heads and underbosses of the biggest families, and whoever is unfortunate enough to be nearby. As his butcher mentor once told him, "Anybody you kill by accident is just one you won't have to kill on purpose."
Waring knows the Mafia will come after him, probably hiring mercs to hunt him down and manages to offer witness protection, which Michael again ignores, preferring to continue to take out big shots. One team of mercs learns that Michael and Waring are connected somehow and go to her home near DC to hold Waring’s family hostage until Michael resurfaces.
Which he does.
I picked up this title from a trip to B/N a few months ago and got on the list at the library. Perry has about 20 titles to his name and this is the third of the Butcher’s Boy series (with Butcher’s Boy and Sleeping Dog). If I read Perry’s website correctly, the Butcher Boy books are spaced (copyright date) 10 years apart and the first won Perry an Edgar for debut novel. Stephen King said that Perry’s 2010 release, Strip, was a Top 10 Summer Read and he has had a number of NYT Best Sellers. Not that I know every crime writer, but this guy’s new to me and he really has got the chops. I think I like the concept behind this series, the plotting (OK, there are a few leaps of faith that may seem a bit far fetched), and the character development and will try to find the other 2 books as well as Strip. Hey, King’s opinion resonates with me as another of his must-read lists turned me to Olen Steinhauer and The Tourist.
East Coast Don
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