For his third brilliant crime novel, following Jimmy Bench-Press
(2002), Stella once again assembles a huge cast of Made Men, DEA and FBI agents, plus local cops and gangstas, hookers and a woman on the run from her abusive husband. Charlie Pellecchia, recently retired from a successful window-washing business, thought a Vegas vacation would offer some fun, a little gambling, for him and his wife, but "early the next morning, Charlie woke up in a ditch behind a construction site." Gradually, he learns that the obnoxious guy whose jaw he broke in a New York club is Nicholas Cuccia, nephew of the acting Mafia underboss, that his love for arias has gotten him dubbed "Charlie Opera" by the cops back home, and that his wife is leaving him. "His marriage was over. The sooner he accepted it, the better." To Cuccia and his goons, however, he figures he'll devote a little more effort. Stella's dialogue is electric and funny, as when a hit man asks Cuccia if he really wants him to whack a guy for breaking his jaw. "Cuccia shook his head. 'No,' he said, 'I want you to whack a guy for forty grand.' " This outing Stella offers us quite a few sympathetic characters, from Charlie and the cocktail waitress he's falling for, to strong-arm men Francone and Lano. You actually feel sorry for the poor New York Mafioso, dropped in Las Vegas like sharks flipped into a pool of piranhas. (Dec. 8)
