Charlie brings back this stone killer from Italy who featured prominently in his previous outing, Joey Piss Pot. In Joey, Charlie told his story with a bit of a wink given the frick and frack back and forth of the two main characters. Not this time. Stella's all business, keeping the yucks at a minimum. Giovanni Rapino, on the other hand, knows his place. He’s a hitman. Do the job, get out. If caught, clam up, do the time. At the end of Joey, Rapino was sent to Big Sandy, a KY prison of some note, to serve a seven-year sentence.
He's two years into his sentence when he is surprisingly transferred to a federal prison camp in SD. Compared to Big Sandy, this camp is a vacation. But only for a couple days when he is scheduled to meet with a Fed. No clue why until the Fed delivers the pitch: your history is perfect for our needs . . . work for us, go undercover, infiltrate a developing cartel operation in MT, gather intel, report back (frequently). Once the cartel finds out that MT isn’t good for business, the feds will set Rapino free and tear up his record. And if Rapino refuses? He gets a 1-way ticket back to Big Sandy. Rapino may not be totally sold, but it beats prison.
The cartels aren’t dumb. If he gets a foot in the door, the cartels will check him out. The Feds set him up with a new identity and a backstory dating back to Italy. Bye bye, Giovanni Rapino. Hello, Ruggiero (Reggie) Amato.
Amato heads off for Bozeman. At a Yankton, SD truck stop, he and a waitress, Brenda Lee of LA, find something in each other that clicks. She’s got no tie to Yankton and joins Amato on his way to Bozeman. They find a place to stay, she finds a waitressing job and Amato steps out to get the cartel’s attention. Which he does when he kills on the cartel’s advance men.
Stella takes us in and out of the lives of Brenda Lee and Reggie, the overbearing Feds, the various cartel scum, not to mention some rumblings back in NYC about the whereabouts of Gio/Reggie and the remnants of Joey Piss Pot that needed resolution, not to mention the fish out of water behavior of cartel, Feds, and mob personnel vs. the locals native to the outback of mostly rural Montana. Be prepared for a steady diet of coffee and cigarettes to go with the back-and-forth negotiations and threats that accompany this mix of cultures.
Strangers in a strange land, right? Plus, what’s a CI to do? Once he’s done the job for the Feds, that included elimination of any number of cartel members, he’s got to look out for himself and Brenda Lee. Always the chance the Feds may turn on him as a loose end that needs to go away.
Have no fear, children. Charlie won’t let you down. Count on him to take you on a complex and convoluted journey of promises, betrayals, and setups, of how a good guy (no matter what his history) and his girl juggle multiple players against each other as they claw their way out of all the messes presented. If Charlie wasn't an author extraordinaire, he'd be a master juggler able to keep all manner of weapons and chainsaws aloft. In the meantime, this mismatched twosome manages to find copius opportunities to crawl all over each other in the sack, horndogs that they are.
But look at it this way. Rapino/Amato can also be viewed as a criminal take on a romance novel (without the long haired buff blond guy riding a horse on the cover). Two broken people of disparate backgrounds, meet, fall in love, and overcome some unconscionable obstacles.
Charlie, are you going soft on us?
Anyway, boys and girls, that is how you get and stay at the top of my power rotation of authors. Find any of his books. You'll learn quickly why I'm hooked.
ECD
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