From Publishers Weekly
A comedy of Mafia manners as brash and shiny as a sharkskin suit struts its way across these pages. Young mafioso Joey Goldman, the illegitimate son of a New York don, gets fed up with his lot as a goombata gofer and takes his bank-teller girfriend Sandra to Key West, where he's "gonna, like, take over." Sandra lands a new job right away, but Joey is stymied by his first foray out of New York mob territory. Rebuffed by the seamiest of local racketeers, Joey is counseled by retired gunsel Bert "the Shirt" to go native; he falls in love with laid-back Key West, where "the air is the temperature of lips," and takes a job pitching time-shares. All is well until big brother Gino drops in from New York--up to his size-17 neck in trouble with the Miami mob over uncut emeralds and misplaced drugs. Joey's former troubles are back in his face as Gino sets him up; death looms before Joey finally outscams the pros to become a self-made man. The plot line flows like a strong ocean current, and Shames's ( The Big Time ) quirky Key West denizens clash wonderfully with the insulated and seamy lives of the mobsters. Film rights to Lee Rich Productions.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The author of The Hunger for More: Searching for Values in an Age of Greed (Times Bks., 1989) proves that fiction is not his forte in this tale of Joey Goldman, the neglected illegitimate son of a New York Mafia don and a Jewish manicurist who drives to Key West with plans to establish his own criminal fiefdom. Joey substantiates his reputation as a loser by assaying a number of rackets that Cubans, Colombians, and another Mafia family have already cornered. With funds running low, he takes a "legal" job as a barker-shill for a condominium development, but his past soon intrudes in the form of his half-brother, Gino Delgato, who engineered a bungled heist of emeralds from the rival Ponte family. Again involved in the brutal give-and-take of gang hegemony, Joey must take steps to save his brother's life as well as his own. The abundance of four-letter words is no substitute for purposeful dialog, and protagonist Joey is so sordidly pathetic, conventional, and slow-witted, that, by comparison, Paddy Chayefsky's Marty is a hero of Homeric proportions.
-Edward Cline, Palo Alto, Cal.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
