The Predators

Returning to his years in Hollywood with Howard Hughes and Universal Studios, his travels through Cannes, Rome, Paris, Rio, the Caribbean, and the Far East, living with and writing about the most ruthless power brokers of our time, Robbins vividly portrays our eternal obsession with greed, desire, and blind ambition.
The Predators take you on a wild odyssey through the gaudy and reckless life of Jerry Cooper: his struggles to survive in Depression-era New York; his years in Europe during the Second World War; his friends, his lovers, his life in organized crime; and his entrance into the world of high-powered international business.

Farewell tour of predatory American business practices by the late Robbins. This differs not a whit in spiritual vacancy from Robbins's earlier works, except that now his sheer storytelling clout rises above dismal bad taste. Opening in the '30s in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, the story circles back to the lower-middle-class settings of Robbins's earliest novels, Never Love a Stranger and A Stone for Danny Fisher (which was set in '30s Chicago), then goes on with a plot that reprises several of his sagas, with many familiar Robbins milieus crammed into one. When high-school senior Jerry Cooper (once Kupferman) is orphaned at 17, his Uncle Harry robs him blind, as does Jerry's 19-year-old lover Kitty, who winds up marrying Uncle Harry while carrying Jerry's child. Uncle Harry, a numbers man who owns a busy soda fountain, hires Jerry to pull sodas after school, which gets him into the carbonated water business (which Uncle Harry also steals from him). Come WWII, Jerry is shipped to France, where he works his way up to master sergeant repairing damaged Jeeps near Paris. He gets into selling them on the black market and also meets Jean Pierre Plescassier, whose family sells Plescassier water (read: Perrier). At war's end, Jerry's knowledge of carbonated water sales in New York leads Jean Pierre to hire him for the introduction of Plescassier water to the States. Then Jerry runs up against the Mafiaand, again, Uncle Harry, who has become a good business friend of Mafia boss Frank Costello. Pages drip with sex, and every story-starved cell gets fed. Goodbye, Harold, and may billions of new readers raise a joyful shout wherever you are. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

There's nothing new or surprising in this posthumously published novel by a grand master of sexy pop fiction. Reading like a 13-year-old boy's ultimate fantasy, the novel tells the story of Jerry Cooper, a scrappy Jewish kid who fights his way up and out of his lower-class background and New York's infamous Hell's Kitchen and into the world of super-rich Paris jet-setters. The story follows Jerry as he fends off advances from dozens of women who are mad for him (and can't keep their hands to themselves); uses his tough-guy street smarts to outsmart the Mafia; does a stint in the army, where, of course, he takes up with a sex-starved stripper; and has affairs with sundry beautiful nymphomaniacs. This is a fast, easy read bursting with sex, greed, and a dizzying array of terms for male genitalia--a million-dollar formula. Kathleen Hughes