Revere Beach Boulevard

A novel both literary and suspenseful, Revere Beach Boulevard tells the story of a family that rallies around an errant son, even as a long-hidden secret that has touched all their lives comes to the surface. Peter Imbesalacqua has bent the rules and battled a gambling addiction for most of his adult life. Now, his real-estate business in shambles and his life in danger because of an unpaid debt, he spins at the center of a hurricane of love and risk. His parents, sister, and friends, all carrying their own secrets, find themselves drawn into the terrifying storm, each trying to do for Peter what he must ultimately do — or fail to do — for himself. Revere Beach Boulevard is a rich and heartfelt novel that looks deeply into the secret places in men's and women's hearts, places only great fiction can reveal.Richard Russo called it “a great novel—ambitious, heartfelt, generous, and oh-so-skilled." And, Washington Post Book World wrote, “Merullo invents a world that mirrors our world in all of its mystery. And he does it in language so happily inventive and precise and musical, and plots it so masterfully, that you are reluctant to emerge from his literary dream."

Forget Michael Corleone and the sexy, sinister underworld of Mario Puzo's Godfather. In Revere, Massachusetts, the face of the Mob is Eddie Crevine, a loan shark with a taste for brutality: "Eddie Creviniello ... out in the middle of Tapley Avenue on a summer night like this. A man laying down near his feet, and Eddie swinging a piece of two-by-four down hard against the man's knees, over and over, like somebody digging a ditch with an ax." This wise guy preys, not on other mobsters, but on the blue-collar denizens of his own Italian American neighborhood, and chief among his targets is Peter Imbesalacqua, a 40-year-old real estate agent whose business has gone south and whose penchant for high-stakes gambling has spiraled out of control.

As if being in debt to the mob weren't bad enough, Peter's family life is a shambles. His mother is dying, his father distraught, and his sister, a television reporter in Boston, has decided to run an exposé on Eddie Crevine, putting all their lives in jeopardy. In Revere Beach Boulevard, author Roland Merullo has all the makings of a top- notch suspense novelist, but it becomes apparent from the first page that crime and punishment are a secondary concern in this story. As Father Dom, the family priest and chronicler of four crucial days in the Imbesalacqua family's life, points out, this story is, at heart, about "the mystery of love, the way we stretch towards it with such persistent optimism, always falling short of our imaginings and always bringing forth new visions in their emptied places."