Payback

New York City in the boomtown 1980 land values skyrocketing, new buildings going up on every block, fortunes being made overnight - and extorted in the morning. On the streets of Hell's Kitchen, the construction rackets are in the hands of the Irish mob. It's always been their turf; now it's their time. And the stakes are higher than ever before - which explains the sudden interest in the Irish on the part of both the Mafia and the feds (led by a female agent trapped by the necessity to prove what she is clearly capable of), and the growing struggle for position and profit within the mob itself, an internecine war that finally ignites in the back rooms and broad daylight of the neighborhood. At the heart of the story are the Adare Paddy, a failed boxer turned mob henchman who's never left the streets he grew up on and who, at thirty-two, is beginning to pay the price for years of living large; and Billy, a college graduate, back home for the summer to work in the tunnels as a sandhog before he enters law school and gets himself out of the old neighborhood and in on the American dream - brothers divided by everything but their powerful blood-tie. Now, as their paths converge on familiar streets in a cross fire of greed, treachery, and violence, their loyalties - to family, friends, neighborhood, and, most important, each other - will be put to a brutal and profoundly telling test.

This is a richly textured, impressive first thriller with links to everything from Upton Sinclair's pioneering exposes of brutal working conditions to Mario Puzo's family- oriented crime novels. Set in the 1980s building boom in New York City, it centers on two brothers: Paddy Adare, a former boxer who works for the Irish mobs that control the construction business in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, and his younger brother, Billy, who is trying to pay for law school by digging foundations for the new buildings. It's Italian gangsters fighting Irish ones, workers battling bosses, and brother against brother in a meaty stew of meaningful action.