Paradise City

The most exciting achievement to date from the acclaimed author of Sleepers and Gangster, Paradise City is a riveting thriller of two cops and two countries, a stunning crime novel about the roots of revenge, honor, and evil.As a fifteen-year-old, Giancarlo Lo Manto learned about injustice the hard way. His father was gunned down by the Camorra, the murderous clan run by Don Nicola Rossi. When his mother moved him from New York back to his family's ancestral home in Naples, Gian found himself face-to-face with the source of the mob's strength, the spring that spawned its deadly killers.Today, twenty-three years later, he is a dogged detective on the Naples police force, homicide division, the most dangerous beat in Europe. He is the nemesis of all who export evil, the man who stops it before it spreads overseas. His efforts have not gone unnoticed. "The strength of Naples reinforces the muscle of New York"--and now the two worlds are about to collide.In the highest towers of the most expensive streets of New York City, Pete Rossi, the son of Don Nicola, has decided to bring Gian back to America--permanently. When Gian learns that his teenage niece, Paula, has gone missing in Manhattan, he cancels a much-needed vacation to Capri, to paradise, joking that "one island is just as good as the other."Gian's homecoming will be anything but smooth. Someone must always watch his back, and Detective Jennifer Fabini gets the job. A gifted officer with her own personal demons, Jennifer thinks she'll be dealing with a peasant from the old country. The handsome, reserved, unrelenting Gian is a revelation: an irritant and a temptation--especially for a woman who has sworn off cops as lovers. Together the two must solve a disappearance that appears to be a kidnapping . . . but turns out to be a deadly trap.As they dash from the sun-struck villages of Italy to the darkest drug dens of New York, their journey links old-world honor and modern-day danger, and ends in a dizzying explosion of the present and the past. Paradise City is Lorenzo Carcaterra's richest entertainment, a book that is at once a sensational crime novel and a provocative exploration of his trademark themes: violence and innocence, love and revenge.From the Hardcover edition.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.