Monza: A Thriller of Formula One Racing, Love, Honor and Murder

Forrest Evers, star driver of auto racing's Team Arundel, takes on Guido, his archrival, and soon finds himself up against money laundering, murder, and the Mob

Judd gets into the heart of his latest racing thriller at the same high rates of speed that his series hero, driver Forrest Evers ( Formula One , The Race ), uses to earn his living. As the story opens, Evers is being dragged naked from his bed in a hotel outside Rome by the Italian police, paraded through an angry crowd and tossed into jail. Eventually, he learns he has been accused of the brutal stabbing of beautiful Rosella di Santo, wife of his bitter rival and teammate, Guido. Evers spirited Rosella away from her home the previous evening, literally minutes after meeting her for the first time, when she convinced him that her life, and that of her week-old son, were being threatened by Guido. When Rosella's parents are murdered with the same knife while Evers is in police custody, he is released. It seems apparent that the killings were carried out by Guido (or his henchmen), but there seems to be no official action in the case. Having promised Rosella on her deathbed that he will protect her son, Evers sets out to uncover his teammate's ties to the Mafia and heads for Sicily, accompanied by a young woman who represents herself as the dead woman's sister but turns out to be something else altogether. Judd supplies lots of racing lore and history here, along with the requisite high-speed climax on the Monza track, but once the pace slows down from the arresting opening chapters, the story itself is difficult to take seriously.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Forrest Evers, the world champion racer who drove flat out through Formula One and The Race, takes the wheel of a vintage Ferrari to rescue a terrified beauty from her Mafia-connected husband. Following a plot openly borrowed from the poet Robert Browning, Bob Judd sends Evers, his Anglo-American driver, out on Italian and Sicilian backroads to find out why it was necessary for Rosella di Santo to die. Signora di Santo was the beautiful young wife of Evers's flamboyant and hot-tempered teammate Guido. She had thrown herself at the mercy of Evers, pleading with him to rescue her from her husband and to look after her new baby if anything should happen to her. Which it did. Before Evers could get Rosella to the safety of Rome, she and the rotten aristocrats who adopted her were brutally stabbed to death. Now, in the company of Anna, a sexy redhead who claims to be Rosella's sister, Evers flies to Palermo to see whether he can tie Guido to Rosella's murder by linking him to the Mafia. Sure enough, Guido's father turns out to be one of the richest, cruelest, and most powerful of the Sicilian crimelords; Anna, whose favors Evers has hugely enjoyed, turns out to be Guido's sister rather than Rosella's; and Rosella's newborn son turns out to be the heir to an ill-gotten fortune. Barely escaping Sicily with his life, Evers returns to the racecourse at Monza, where he will duel with the monstrous Guido. The weapons of choice will be race cars. As there can be few surprises in the time-honored plot, the fun is all in the scenery, the Italians, and the truly terrifying driving. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This action-packed adventure follows two earlier novels about race car driver Forrest Evers ( Formula One , Morrow, 1989; The Race , LJ 3/15/91), but it proves far more morally ambiguous than its predecessors. Forrest dislikes fellow driver Guido and agrees to help his wife Rosella escape from him. When Rosella is brutally murdered, Forrest feels guilty and sets out to prove that Guido killed her. In so doing, he becomes a target for Guido's Sicilian Mafia relatives, who fail to nail him but bump off a lot of innocent people in his place. Unable to prove Guido's responsibility, Forrest nonetheless gets revenge. Buy this for your action-adventure collection and for those who liked the earlier novels.
- Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.