Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
What happens to a priggish, WASPy, disillusioned Wall Street lawyer when a Mafia crime boss moves into the mansion next door in his posh Long Island neighborhood? He ends up representing the gangster on a murder rap and even perjures himself so the mafiosostet lc can be released on $5 million bail. That's the premise of DeMille's ( The Charm School ) bloated, unpersuasive thriller. Attorney John Sutter has problems that would daunt even Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. His marriage is crumbling, despite kinky sex games with his self-centered wife, Susan, who's the mistress of his underworld client Frank Bellarosa. The IRS is after Sutter, and his law firm wants to dump him. As a sardonic morality tale of one man's self-willed disintegration, the impact is flattened by its elitist narrator's patrician tones. A comic courtroom scene and some punches at the end, however, redeem the novel somewhat. BOMC main selection; film rights to Guber/Peters-Columbia. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Sardonic blue blood John Sutter leads a comfortable life on Long Island with his beautiful, incredibly rich wife, Susan. Their idyll is threatened when Frank Bellarosa, the nation's biggest Mafioso, moves into the mansion next door, but their determination to snub him falls victim to favors they owe him, then to curiosity, and finally to friendship. Soon, John finds himself losing friends, telling off family, defending Frank against a murder charge, and perjuring himself in the process. Worse, he suspects Susan is sleeping with the don. In a hilariously self-congratulatory introduction, DeMille repeatedly compares his 1991 novel to The Great Gatsby, a comparison that doesn't hold up, of course. Still, the book's almost anthropological examinations of both the very rich and the Mafia hold the listener's attention. While this has a low body count for a DeMille work, the author's trademark humor, well delivered by reader Scott Brick, makes it a good bet for libraries where DeMille is popular.-John Hiett, Iowa City P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
DeMille's best--and wisest--so far: a fabulous mainstream entertainment that should be subtitled Variations on a Theme by F. Scott Fitzgerald Though DeMille (Word of Honor, 1985; The Charm School, 1988) reprises The Great Gatsby at almost three times Gatsby's length, and finally produces a novel less moving and high-flown than Gatsby, he nonetheless also models his characters more roundly, features a stronger plot--and offers an unputdownable read. It's filled with death, taxes, sex, the Mafia, and the very, very rich in the Long Island enclave called the ""Gold Coast""--that area where the Roosevelts (said ""Roozvelts"") and the Vanderbilts held court, and where the inbred manners are such that people are instantly bored by the mention of money (although business is all right). Into this golden oyster moves the biggest gangster in America, Frank Bellarosa, who buys the decaying Alhambra estate and restores it to overwhelmingly vulgar heights of excess: his pink marble ""palm court"" has dozens of brightly plumed tropical birds and is ""a cross between a public aviary in Rio de Janeiro and an upscale florist shop in a Florida mall."" Meanwhile, his next door-neighbor is snooty tax lawyer John Whitman Sutter, husband to the even snootier Susan Stanhope Sutter. Bellarosa invades their lives, partly to draw the impeccable Sutter into Frank's defense for his murder of a Colombian drug-dealer, and partly to get Susan into bed. DeMille enjoys spicing things up with kinky sex (all mild but out-of-character for John Sutter to narrate about Susan), a lead-pipe murder, and a Little Italy shooting. The best stuff is Sutter's legal maneuvers for Bellarosa and DeMille's familiarity with tax law. The climax shows us that the very rich--like Daisy Buchanan--can get away with murder. Does DeMille put all this together as an outsider pretending to be an insider? Perhaps--but one quickly surrenders to the sheer skill and lived-in quality of each page. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
