摘要
In the fall of '73, Brooklyn, New York, is home to worn-down hotels, wise guys, immigrants, the disturbed, the disenfranchised, and a few people just trying to make an honest buck. When Silvano Iurata's troubled brother, Noonie, rumored to be living in Brooklyn Heights, goes missing, Silvano returns to a place he swore he'd never set foot in again.
He left Brooklyn a long time ago -- wanting to leave behind his family and its seedy mob connections and a past that just won't stay buried. The jungles of Viet Nam felt more hospitable to him than his own hometown; now that he's back, he doesn't intend to stay for long. His cousin Domenic has harbored a deadly grudge against Silvano for something that happened when they were teenagers, but they aren't kids anymore, and his cousin has some dangerous friends. Silvano needs to find out what happened to his brother, and get out -- fast.
Was Noonie a victim of Little Dom's revenge? Or is he still alive and at risk? Silvano noses around where he doesn't belong, among Brooklyn's underworlds of the criminal and of the dispossessed, and has to face his family demons once and for all. He not only puts himself in serious jeopardy but also exposes some new friends -- and the woman he has come to love -- to the vengeful cousin who would do anything to see Silvano dead.
A tale of revenge and redemption, The Angel of Montague Street has the same vivid characters, razor-sharp detail, and dead-on dialogue that made Norman Green's debut novel, Shooting Dr. Jack, an unforgettable snapshot of life on the streets of Brooklyn. With its perceptive, poignant heart and gripping plot, this is literary suspense at its best.
出版社周刊评论
As a fresh face in the hard-boiled crime fiction sweepstakes, Green (Shooting Dr. Jack) is carving out a niche for himself with his piercing portraits of men trapped by their tainted pasts. Green's new hero, Silvano Iurata, is a Vietnam vet and a Buddhist who has returned to his native Brooklyn. He knows that he should not have come back home, since his mob-connected family has it in for him, but he has to find his brother, Noonie, who has mysteriously disappeared. He haunts the seedy hotels, dark alleys, dives and flophouses of the borough, drifting from one false lead to the next, deciphering double-crosses and dodging bullets, fists and romance. His relatives hold a number of grudges, both real and imagined, against him. Uncle Angelo, a genuine mobster out of central casting, believes Silvano is untrustworthy and spills family secrets. Little Dom, Silvano's cousin, wants him dead for a series of slights going back to their teen years. While Green lacks the clever wordplay of Elmore Leonard or the brooding explosiveness of Joe Connelly and George Pelacanos, he gets off some hilarious bits of dialogue, sudden bursts of manic action and sharp tongue-in-cheek descriptions. The mystery of his brother's disappearance loses some of its urgency, but Silvano's journey is no less gripping. At first glance, he may seem like the usual noir hero at war with himself, but Green taps into something larger with his subtle pronouncements about family curses, bad choices, lost souls, mindless violence and redemption. This sophomore effort cements his place in the upper echelons of neo-noir. 7-city author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
An Army veteran returns to a Brooklyn Heights stewpot that makes his recent tour of Vietnam look like a cakewalk. Even before he rose to power in one of New York's Five Families, Domenic Scalia never liked Silvano Iurata. He thinks his underachieving cousin killed Little Dom's mobbed-up father Angelo 20 years earlier. He thinks Silvano slept with his sister Jeannette and drove her to a cloistered order as the only place she could escape him. He's made it clear that he'd like nothing better than to slit Silvano's throat--if only he could find him. And now it's 1973, and Silvano is back in town, living in the Montague, a rotting hotel right under his cousin's nose, asking questions about his brother Nunzio, who disappeared from the even more decrepit St. Felix with nary a trace. His nosy questions provide a golden opportunity for Little Dom to avenge his relatives, consolidate his power, and make his move on the Black and White armored car company--all the while giving Ivan Bonifacio, his latest enforcer, a chance to flex his muscles. Silvano knows his cousin is gunning for him, but he's not losing any sleep over the dangers of returning to the neighborhood. He's a man who can handle himself--even before his military stint, he'd compiled an impressive record as an amateur boxer--and his thirst for vengeance is just as strong as Little Dom's. Joined on occasion by beautiful Elia Taskent of Black and White, he navigates the treacherous byways of Brooklyn, meeting a dozen sad survivors for a hundred unforgettable conversations on the road to his destiny. As in his dark debut, Shooting Dr. Jack (2001), Green presents a cast of folks who talk like Elmore Leonard but live in a reeking urban hell right out of George P. Pelecanos--along with their sense of grim fatalism in the face of impossible odds. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
摘录
The Angel of Montague Street Chapter One The Montague was an old whore of a hotel; she stood on the corner of Henry and Montague Streets in Brooklyn, New York. She was a couple of decades past her prime when Silvano Iurata landed there in the fall of '73, but if you squinted your eyes hard enough to filter out the grime you could still see something of what she used to be when she was young and glorious, green marble columns in the lobby thirty feet high, floor-to-ceiling windows, ornate wainscoting, carved mahogany front desk, plaster lions molded into the ceiling, so far up you could barely make them out, up there snarling down at you in sooty malevolence. She was maybe eighteen stories high, the lower floors more desirable than the upper ones because only one of the three elevators worked. One of the other two was generally shut down for repairs and the third was broken and sealed off for good. In one corner of the lobby was a bar, a dimly lit room behind swinging doors that had the image of a piano frosted into the thick green glass. Silvano flopped on an ancient couch and waited for the night manager to locate his paperwork. He glanced in the bar's direction but he had no real desire to go in; bars were not his thing, particularly when they were small, dank, and heavy with the smell of beer, urine, and unwashed bodies. He wasn't that thirsty, couldn't imagine being that thirsty. An old guy with a cracked leather face and a red potato nose watched him from the bar doorway, and after a while, his beverage in his hand, he made his way carefully over to where Silvano sat. "Excuse me," he said, in that whispery voice guys get when their upper teeth are gone. "I know you from someplace. Someplace overseas." Oh, I hope not, Silvano thought, keeping his expression blank. He looked at the old boy's face, trying to picture what he might have looked like before time and bad habits had worked him over. "I don't think so," he said. "You don't look familiar." "You sure? I was a news service photographer during the fifties and sixties. I worked the Middle East and North Africa. I swear I ran into you over there someplace." Silvano shook his head, relieved. "Not me," he said, "late sixties, I was in Southeast Asia." "Damn. I was so sure. Damn. Guy must've been your twin, then." He chuckled and drained off what was left in his glass. "Maybe you'll meet the guy some day. What did you do, in Southeast Asia." "Worked for a messenger service." "Ah," he said, looking down into his glass. "One of those guys. You with the Company?" Silvano shook his head. "No. I was just an observer for the Defense Department." "You don't look like an observer. You look more like a participant." He had a wry smile on his face. "Well, anyway," he said, rattling his ice cubes, "I need a refill. Come on in and join me sometime. I'll buy you a drink, we can talk about the bad old days." "Yeah, sure." Silvano shook his head as he watched the old boy make his way unsteadily back over where he'd come from. Funny, he thought, when you're young and you're spending it, you never think you're gonna get old and have to struggle to make the payments. You see some old bugger just hanging on, just trying not to die today, he looks like some kind of an alien creature, but he's you, brother, just as sure as that little shit who went to high school was you, and you'll get there all too soon. He tried again to place the old man's face, going back in his mind, remembering, until he caught himself at it and pulled back. Bad neighborhood, he told himself, you can't afford to hang out there. You got to stay in the now. Easier said than done, though. He kept waiting for things to be different, but he kept winding up in the Hotel Montague or someplace like her, back in the arms of some old blowser who would give him shelter for a while. Someone had once said, he couldn't remember who, that home is where you can go, and they have to let you in. Maybe that's what kept him where he was, or maybe he was supposed to learn something, maybe he was supposed to have some sort of an incremental awakening before he could go on to the next level. But whatever the reason, he always felt more comfortable in the low-rent joints, where you didn't need to worry if your shirt or your haircut or your politics were right, if you had the price of a round they'd be glad to see you no matter how you looked or how badly you'd treated them the last time out, and they'd say, welcome back, sonny, have a seat, tell us where you been this long time. There was still a lot of old fleabags like the Hotel Montague in that part of Brooklyn, from the Brooklyn Bridge stretching south and west along the waterfront past the Port Authority docks. The Hotel Montague was about the best of the bunch, at the time. Some of the others were pretty bad, like the Lady Margaret or the Stanford. With those two, it was only a question of whether they burned down before they fell down, or vice versa. The Castle Arms was another one, big square brick building with a parapet on each corner. It was not a bad place, relatively clean, still had some normal people in it. It had a big empty room on the first floor that had once been a restaurant, and a huge ballroom one floor down ... The Angel of Montague Street . Copyright © by Norman Green. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Angel of Montague Street by Norman Green All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
