The Rackets
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Fired from the mayor’s office, a political flack ends up in his old neighborhood, with a newly dangerous mission
Jimmy Dolan should have known better than to shove Frankie Keefe. Keefe may be scum—a corrupt teamster president who’s looking forward to crushing Jimmy’s father in the next union election—but Jimmy is the mayor’s right hand man, and kowtowing to scum is his job. After hearing one too many cracks about his father, Jimmy shoves the union boss onto the floor, in full view of some of the city’s most powerful people. In a flash, Jimmy’s career is finished. He returns to Inwood, in the wilds of north Manhattan, to pick up the pieces. But when his father is murdered, Jimmy takes up the old man’s campaign against Frankie Keefe. It may be suicide, but he’s got nothing else to lose. After years in City Hall, Jimmy Dolan is about to learn how ugly New York politics can get.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A blue-tinted review in adult Forecasts indicates a book that we believe is of exceptional interest to our readers but that hasn't received a starred or boxed review.THE RACKETSThomas Kelly. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24 (384p) Written by a former construction worker and Teamster who worked his way through Fordham and Harvard to become "director of advance," a chief aide and troubleshooter for the mayor of New York City, this rugged, straight-shooting novel (following Kelly's well-reviewed debut, Payback) isshaped by intimate firsthand knowledge. Jimmy Dolan, the Director of Advance for the Republican mayor of New York, is fired after his hotheaded exchange with Frankie Keefe the Mafia-connected president of the local Teamsters who is running for reelection against Jimmy's father, Mike makes front-page headlines. Overnight a political pariah, Jimmy seeks refuge among his old friends in a formerly Irish neighborhood on the northern tip of Manhattan. Reunited with his old girlfriend Tara O'Neil, now an NYPD cop, and Liam Brady, an ex-paratrooper construction worker with an active commerce in illegal arms, Jimmy ends up back in construction. On the job, he witnesses the cold-blooded assassination of his father, who is becoming too much of a threat to Keefe. Vowing to avenge the death, Jimmy decides to run in his father's place. His own life and his friends' lives are soon threatened in what is revealed to be an uneven battle: Keefe is an informer, under government protection. Fighting deceit and betrayal, Jimmy prevails against all odds in this damning indictment of the clandestine interplay between big government and the criminal underground. Despite minor lapses into overlong, melodramatic introspection, the suspense holds to the end, and the novel draws readers deep into a gritty, wholly convincing world of late-20th-century union halls and construction sites.
