Odessa Beach

Niki Zorakoff is the Prince of Pushkin Square, a Moscow black marketer who engages in crime simply because it is one of the only ways to make a good living in the Russian capital. The KGB are on to him, though, so he defects to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn (dubbed Odessa Beach because so many Russian emigres have settled there), where he enlists the loan-sharking aid of the Mafia in opening his dream nightclub, Moscow Nights. When some of his Mafia connections backfire, and it seems his life is in danger, he goes to top don Paul Malatesta with information he has gleaned from an old friend in Rome about an informant who's getting ready to bust major segments of the Cosa Nostra. Niki's in it over his head, however, and he soon learns that the games he played in Moscow aren't the ones he can play in New York. Leuci (Doyle's Disciples) has a strong, spare style, but this story is superficial in plot and character development, and the Russian-Italian alliances and antagonisms are never compellingly drawn. November