The Gotti Wars

The Gotti Wars sets out a bird’s eye view of Gleeson’s two prosecutions of the notorious mobster John Gotti, one unsuccessful and one successful. Not only is the subject matter fascinating, but the book is well-written and captivating. Gleeson’s story here parallels his legal career from that of a newbie second chair at a circus of a trial to his crowning achievement, the RICO prosecution and the flipping of Sammy the Bull Gravano, who admitted to involvement in eighteen killings, but turned on the Gambino Family in one of the most amazing stories. While the Gotti Wars takes place in sterile courtrooms and government offices, it has the feel of an action novel. The focus is on the big picture for the most part and the narrative does not get swallowed up in the nuts and bolts of legal minutiae.

In some respects, this true crime/ legal story is almost too amazing to be true. You might think you are watching the actors in Goodfellas. It’s Aldo the story of an end of an era as the FBI and the Assistant US Attorneys broke the back of the Mafia, which until then was firmly entrenched in all manner of corruption.

Ashes of Man

Ashes of Man is the fifth volume in Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series, a science fiction fantasy spanning the cosmos and featuring one half-mortal Hadrian Marlowe. It would certainly benefit a careful reader to first read the previous volumes, lengthy and epic though each of them be. Although much of the first quarter of the book sets up the action that dominates the remainder of the book, all of the setup is based on the previous books, the characters and relationships established earlier, and a storyline continuing from the previous epic. That said, Ashes of Man is a fully-absorbing tale, grand in its scope and its depth.

Hadrian, having suffered seven years of torture and imprisonment from the Cielcin, and in particular, their leader, the prophet, Syriani Dorayaica. The Cielcin (and if you are still living and breathing, odds are you’ve never encountered them) are a race of giant man-eating cockroaches who know only domination, do not understand peace or treaty, and race across the universe in planet-sized spaceships. They see themselves as gifted by ancient races and long to demolish everything.

Allied with them are breakaway worlds who think that they will be left in peace, not understanding that they are only setting themselves up to be eaten last as they harvest their cities to feed the Cielcin’s voracious appetites.

Hadrian is but a shell of his former self, broken physically and mentally and not sure he wants to serve the Imperium of the Sollan Empire. He is at once the only hope humanity has and feared as someone different who perhaps cannot be killed. The struggle he always seems to face is his loyalty to the Caesar, who has seldom returned that loyalty, and service to his own self. While he struggles with palace intrigue, the universe is closing in and Armageddon is coming with the Cielcin.

As with the other novels in this series, what the reader gets is a rich adventure epic in scale.

The Ferryman

Scheduled for May 3, 2023, publication, Cronin’s “The Ferryman” is a boundless science fiction fantasy that will spin your head around in circles. You may feel that you are at first revisiting Logan’s Run, the Matrix, 1984, Lathe of Heaven, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the TV series Lost. That is because you will literally fall down through several rabbit holes as you journey through this novel.

The heart of the story is of course a dystopian fantasy as seen through the experiences of Director Proctor Bennett. It is a utopian paradise known as Prospera where art and science flourish and the ferryman leads those whose monitors have expired to the ferry for retirement or, at least, a return to the Nursery for a new iteration.

The beginning is ushered in with poetic license, leaving the reader to gasp at the wonder of this world, although later we learn that someone has to make things work and there is an underclass that is exploited and resentful. With revolution seething below the surface, Proctor begins to see that all is not as it initially seems and that things are not quite right for all. That is, his world shatters when he learns a secret and learns about Arrivals. As a Ferryman, he only really knew about Departures.

Of course, Proctor eventually is red-pilled and begins to see the world differently again and again. He understands that there are possibilities beyond the horizon and that there might be an escape. The question as always though is what can you achieve through revolution or flight and will it be a better world or just a new design of an old one.

What makes this work is that the world of Prospera is believable and the storyline changes are slowly fed to the reader so that nothing is quite jarring although there are points where a reader might be confused for a bit. All in all, it is a compelling tale that this reader could not put down before finishing in one long evening.

Where The Crawdads Sing

Now a major motion picture as it says on the cover, Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing is a beautifully-crafted poetic homage to coastal North Carolina and a story about what it means to be different. There’s a murder mystery and a criminal trial, but the heart and soul of the tale is Kya’s life on the marshes, next to but away from civilization.

Kya was the last survivor of a marshland shack family with a violent drunken father and a mother who one day had enough and packed a bag and walked away. Kya spent years watching for her mother’s return as her Brothers and sisters one by one ran off. The last survivor with a father who was more often than not drink and missing in action, Kya manages to survive on her own. She tried school for one day until she had enough at being laughed at. The rest of the time she made do on her own, foraging and trading and making crafts.

She is known as the Marsh Girl, barefoot, unkempt, dirty. She lives in the shadows as she grows into a teenager. Of course, as a girl growing into a woman, she attracts boys, one of whom teaches her to read and then abandons her. The other she can’t quite figure out, but she knows his relationship with her is always in the shadows, never in public.

This is Kya’s story, although she doesn’t tell it in the first person. It’s her story of the beauty she finds in nature and how awkwardly she connects with Civilization. In some ways, she is as misunderstood as Boo Radley in the classic Mockingbird.