New York City, October 1962: The Cuban missile crisis threatens the world as a drug war consumes the mafia. Caught up in its midst is Davey Rossi, former lightweight champion and son of Mafia don Vince Rossi. As Davey trains for his comeback to regain the title, he learns of a secret kept by Vince and his brother Johnny--a betrayal that split the Rossi family and caused its tragic involvement in the long-buried wars between the Jewish and Italian gangsters of the 1920's and 30's. The past and its deadly mystery force Davey to enter the violent life he has tried to avoid. He is pitted against ambitious, cunning Mafiosi steeped in guile and treachery. Davey searches for Dolly Irving, the reclusive stage star of the 1920's who knew the mobsters of that glamorous, roaring decade. And he falls in love with Julie Alpert, a beautiful tax attorney whose covert agenda threatens to bring down the Rossi family. Told in a pitch-perfect voice, with a rich and varied cast, and set against the backdrop of the Kennedy brothers' vendetta against the Mafia, Thy Father's Son is a stunning novel of family loyalty, redemption, and the sins of the past that can only be expiated by vengeance. Prizefighter Davey Rossi must face the fact that he was adopted by the Italian Mafia don who killed his Jewish gangster father. This well-told tale unfolds in late-fifties/early-sixties New York City, just as the Mafia embraces the drug trade. Rutman delivers knockout boxing descriptions, and the mobsters behave in exactly the way we have come to expect from every pop-culture depiction since The Godfather. That's only a problem for those who have grown a bit weary of stories that rehash the gang wars of a bygone era and attempt to imbue them with a profundity Sopranos fans realize they never really had. Readers looking for a traditional Syndicate story with all the right moves will embrace this book. Others, driven forward by the compelling narrative even as they bemoan its seeming inability to break free of old-style Mafia tropes, might find themselves ruefully quoting Michael Corleone's famous line from The Godfather, Part III : "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" Frank Sennett Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Rutman takes one part deceit, two parts treachery, sprinkles his brew with revenge and flavors with a touch of boxing..." --Bert Randolph Sugar, author of 100 Greatest Boxers of All Time and 100 Years of Boxing "This is a corking good story, multi-layered and complex, of Mafia intrigue and treachery in New York City." --Albert Fried, author of The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster Leo Rutman is the author of three previous novels, all set in New York City. He has written several critically acclaimed plays, and received playwriting awards from Columbia University and from Yale where he was a Joseph E. Levine Film Fellow. He was playwright in residence at Brandeis University and has been a member of the Playwrights Unit from the Actor's Studio. He is a lifelong New Yorker. 1 AUTUMN IS my favorite time of the year. It holds the promise of things to come. The days are warm and the nights cool. But there’s also something sad about autumn. You can see the summer slipping away, a seemingly endless string of days now gone. Stolen away by an unseen hand. Like a life: one day you wake up and you’re old. But there is something else in the air in the autumn of 1962. If you were raised in the world I come from, you could smell it. It hangs there sharp and pungent, like a rancid piece of meat crawling with maggots. The smell of fear permeated the mob. After six years, Dino Manfredi had been released from federal prison in Atlanta on August 28. The witness who had sent him away on a drug rap had recanted his testimony. When Dino got caught, it was very convenient for a lot of people. Convenience in the underworld is a euphemism for set-up. Vince told me about it one night over dinner. A neat, tight frame, which featured the canarylike voice of a street fly and drug pusher named Gaspare Manzo, who swore that he was part of a drug deal and witnessed Dino buying a lot of little bags of heroin. It got Dino ten years, until Gaspare Manzo suddenly recanted his testimony before a federal appeals judge. Somebody had taken an ax to that tight little frame. Gaspare had been paid a lot of money to take a perjury rap. The edge is a funny bird. It doesn’t play favorites. Now Dino was free and everybody waited for his next move. I’ve been training in Pompton Lakes for the Kid Bassett fight. Today Johnny drove up from the city to see me work out. We are just sitting down for lunch on a small patio outside my cottage when the telephone rings. One of my sparring partners answers. It’s for Johnny. He goes inside and doesn’t come out for some minutes. When he returns, the smile is gone from his face and his eyes are somber and heavy. It’s a warm October day, but suddenly there is a