American Gangster

A FAMILY AFFAIR

Just when Nolan’s looking for a way out of his dead-end job, trouble comes knocking, and he’s back in business. Someone harboring an old grudge has just picked off Joey DiPreta. a crooked businessman with ties to the mob. and the guy’s family is out to get whoever’s responsible. So is Nolan’s Family — in Chicago — and they offer him big bucks and a piece of a swank hotel if he II protect their interests.

Only this time Nolan’s gotten into more than he bargained for. The hit man turns out to be a Vietnam vet convinced he’s launched a holy war against vice and corruption — and the son of one of Nolan’s friends. The melodramatic bastard’s got hard evidence of graft in high places, and he’s set himself up as some kind of avenging angel. His master plan calls for more hits, and there’s no telling when he’ll stop.

Meanwhile, Nolan’s pal Jon is courting disaster in a motel room, and a couple of innocents are kidnapped as a ploy to lure the hit man into the open. Somehow Nolan’s got to untangle the whole mess — and see that no one gets hurt. But with both sides out for blood, there’s no room for heroes, and he’ll have to be damned careful — and lucky — not to get nailed in the crossfire.

A legendary and retired police chief lies in a New York hospital bed, visited by two strangers: the first is ex-cop-turned-PI Mike Hammer, whose life was saved more than once by the old man. To the detective, the chief gives a mysterious key. The second visitor murders the chief, mere days before he would have died from natural causes. Someone is trying to tie up loose ends, and Mike Hammer is the only one with the evidence and calculation to ferret him or her out.

Lake Tahoe, 1973: Michael Satariano — who as a young man fought the Capone mob in Chicago — has reached a comfortable middle age, with a loving wife at home, a talented teenage daughter in high school, and a son earning medals in Vietnam. Now running a casino for the mob, Michael thinks he’s put his killing days behind him — after all, he’s made a respectable life for himself and his family... and plenty of money for the boys back in Chicago. So when godfather Sam Giancana orders him to hit a notoriously violent and vulnerable gangster, Michael refuses. But when the hit goes down anyway, Michael is framed for murder; to save his family, he must turn state’s witness under the fledgling Witness Protection Program.

Relocated to the supposed safety of Paradise, a tract-housing development in Arizona, Michael soon finds himself facing a wrath so cruel that even the boy raised by a hitman father is unprepared. And with his teenage daughter in tow, Michael must return to the road and a violent way of life he thought he had long left behind.

In this stunning third installment of a trilogy so gripping and masterfully written that it could only come from “[among] the finest crime writers working today” we once again have a spellbinding window into a time of heroes and villains — and, above all, a journey along a road on which a man’s greatest crimes are all a part of his lifelong struggle for redemption.