The Last Hit Man by Robin Yocum

 Remember the opening story from Goodfellas? When teenager Henry Hill says that all he ever wanted to do was be a gangster? In this book, Angelo Cipriani wanted to be a criminal dating back to his high school years. 

 

Angelo grew up in a Steubenville, OH (NE Ohio for you geographically challenged) neighborhood known as Spaghetto, home to Italian immigrants.  But Angelo wasn't a pure breed Italian. His mom was Ukranian and the 'real' Italians in town never let him forget it. As such, Angelo grew up tough, because he had to. 

Angelo dropped out of high school and took a job cleaning floors and spittoons in a local pool hall. His willingness to do what was necessary caught the eye of a capo within the Fortunato family eventually getting to meet Alphonso - the boss. This family controlled gambling, numbers, sports book, and prostitution up and down the upper Ohio River valley (from Youngstown down the borders of OH, PA, WV) to Wheeling. The Fortunato's were frequently at odds with other families controlling other regions of the upper Midwest, but in the interest of business, a tense peace prevailed. Big Al kinda liked the kid and brought him into the family and the organization. So Angelo was brought up slowly by doing collections and helping with record keeping on the book making operation.

The family business was run top down with Big Al pulling the strings, paying bribes and tributes, playing criminal and cops against each other, and making all decisions regarding the family business. His son, Big Tommy, a business graduate from Bowling Green St Univ, would take over upon Al's death. Big Tommy had a son, Little Tommy, who was Big Tommy's heir apparent. Big Tommy liked  Angelo and elevated his importance by making him the understudy of Carlo Della Russo, the family executioner who taught Angelo the ways and practices of ethical execution. When Angelo finally gets his chance, he shows Carlo just how much he'd learned. Little Tommy has no use for Angelo and he also learns that because he isn't 100% Italiano, he'd wasn't in line to become a made man. Just the way it is. He'd be treated as such, but he wasn't and never would get that honor.

The book traces the fortunes of the Fortunato family over 40 years and three generations of leadership. Of the changing face of organized crime from book making, loan sharking, and prostitution in the old days to running hard drugs. All businesses evolve, even crime. Angelo also has to evolve. He has a growing reputation amongst the neighboring mobs and police, but he's so good at his job, the cops are left with suspicions, but never any evidence. Besides, the police don't much care if one family's hit man offs some leadership of another mob. 

In the 70s, Angelo gets married, his wife is pregnant, and they go out to celebrate. That doesn't go well and it leaves Angelo with a vendetta that must be reconciled with, no matter how long it takes.  Angelo has a long memory, but also has a girlfriend, a waitress at a local diner he frequents daily. 

Once Big Tommy passes, Little Tommy, ruthless thug and spoiled rotten piece of . . . you know,  has no real use for a late 60s yo hitter when he's got his own favs in their 20s. Little Tommy effectively rejects all the income streams that have kept the family going for nearly 40 years in favor of trafficking in hard drugs. Money is coming in so fast, he hardly knows where to stash it all. 

Now the Fortunatos had a 'you scratch my back' relationship with the cops and if the local cops were happy, the Feds sort of let things go the way things were. For two generations of Fortunatos, this was SOP. Little Tommy? Not so much. 

The Feds want Little Tommy and to get him, they approach Angelo. Rat out Little Tommy in exchange for witness protection. After plenty of back and forth, Angelo agrees only if he can take one of the few remaining mobsters still around as well as his girlfriend. 

And while that sounds like the perfect solution to Angelo's problems. Oh so wrong, grasshopper. The FBI still has a few tricks up its sleeves. And I'll leave it at that. 

Robin Yocum has six novels to his credit, most all of which were either nominated for various national awards or won a few. I hope people will pick this up and give it a go. It's told in flashbacks from current day (Angelo is 69yo) and back to the pool hall and forward through 40ish years. The prose flows smoothly (it's told like the reader is listening to Angelo recite his life story), the dialogue sounds pretty authentic (but who am I to say whether it is or isn't. Maybe friend of the blog, Charlie Stella, might have more to say about that). The setting (Steubenville) is almost a character in and of itself. This really is an engaging read. You are rooting for Angelo to find whatever it is he is looking for. To avenge what was taken from him. To get away scott free. Reach that turning point in his journey that gets him safely out of the life. In short, I think readers will grow to like Angelo as the story unfolds.  

This is Yocum's latest and, unless I read the ending of the book all wrong, it's not the last we've heard from Angelo Cipriani. 

Set a reminder on your calendar for 2 DEC 2025 for its release date.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance reviewer copy in exchange for an unbiased review. 

ECD 

Killer Tracks

 

I’m sorry that I’m only getting to this review when it’s been a full month since I actually read it. I’ve been on a long and very busy vacation in places where my internet connection was weak, if it even existed at all. I remember thinking that the plot of Killer Tracks by Mary Keliikoa had potential. It’s a story about a married couple who lost their 3-year-old daughter to leukemia. The loss was so painful that the marriage didn’t survive. Some years later, Sheriff Jax Turner and his ex-wife Abby Kanekoa were trying to see if their relationship had a chance of survival and if it was worth it to try again. Both were involved in law enforcement. Jax was the sheriff in a small summer tourist town, Misty Pines, and Abby was an FBI agent in a big city. In the book, we quickly meet the whole cast of characters in the Misty Pines Sheriff Office. Jax and Abby are trying to have a weekend away despite their nearly 24/7 responsibilities.

 

My criticism has to do with the flow of the plot, which was uneven. The author spent too much time on the worries of the main characters that the relationship was really gone and there was no hope for them, as well as their fear that their respective other had already moved on. It was the introduction of Hannah that turned the experience of this book to a negative one for me. She was a psychopath, apparently in league with a very bad man, Backstrom, who was released from prison on a technicality. It was not believable that despite both Jax and Abby having been experienced and successful law enforcement officers that they repeatedly got sucked in to Hannah’s manipulations. Her statements were contradictory, but supposedly Jax and Abby were distracted from seeing clearly because of their own relationship issues. I just don’t buy that.

 

Bottomline, I can’t recommend this book. I think it could be rewritten into a much better story.

 

Atmosphere

 Atmosphere is the first novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid to be reviewed in this blog. She has written at least five other novels. I found this on my Kindle and read Atmosphere while on a long airplane flight. The author certainly captured the thrill of learning about the sky and stars, and she clearly created a story of space flight that is entirely believable and a tragedy that seemed very real. The plot is about that tragedy in space and the attempts by a former astronaut and a current astronaut to bring the space shuttle safely back to earth. The story was about the CAPCOM, the only person on the ground from NASA who talked with the astronauts in the shuttle, and others who were a part of NASA. Joan Goodwin was the first woman to have done so. 

Reid explored the efforts of Joan, who seemed to be on the spectrum of autism, something formerly called Asperger’s Syndrome. She had no real relationships with anyone other than her niece, had no significant connection to her sister or her mother. Joan had never had a boyfriend. She was in love with her work. Joan was also the victim of the rampant misogyny at NASA. It was the same with her classmates in astronaut training group #9, Vanessa Ford. Ford was a mechanic and pilot, but she was assigned to be second seat during training and was told she would never be allowed to fly the shuttle. I thought the various roles of different students and their different personalities was well-presented and it clearly contributed to the plot development. Reid wrote convincingly of the fire that killed three astronauts as they trained for Apollo I, an event that was used effectively to impress the fictional astronauts and this reader of the dangers these astronauts-in-training agreed to accept.

 

When she finally got her chance to go to space, Joan quickly discovered that the extended weightlessness of space was simply something she could not tolerate. She kept vomiting most of the duration of her trip. She made a decision to transfer out of the astronaut group and into the space command center. It was at about the halfway point of this compelling story that Joan discovered that she was gay, and that led to a relationship with Vanessa, a relationship that they had to hide if their careers at NASA were to continue. Reid wrote with relish about Joan’s awakening to the world about her and the meaning of her relationships with her niece, sister and mother, it was as if she was fully emerging from her Asperger’s. However, it was not only NASA that had to be kept in the dark about her love of Vanessa, it was also her own family.  So after the disaster happened in space and Joan was the only one who could feed Vanessa the data she needed to bring the shuttle back from orbit, the drama of the story ramped up even more. The title of this book is surely a double entendre which has been artfully applied by the author.