Clover Honey

Tommaso's first book-length work displays a handsomely quirky drawing style and an incipient talent for emotionally complex storytelling. A side trip to the racetrack (using mob money) results in a fatal misunderstanding between Trevor, a slacker hit man/courier for the Jersey mob, and his bosses, who decide he's stealing from them. Trevor goes into hiding and the Family asks his cousin Abigail, an apprentice hit chick and Trevor's former protege in crime, to find him. Abigail's search turns up Patty, a troubled mutual childhood friend, spurring a series of memory flashbacks-a familiar get-me-out-of-this-house portrait of a suffocating Italian American family-that provide the emotional backdrop for this ultimately tragic story. Despite Tommaso's efforts to portray characters trapped by fate and familial circumstance, the book's pop cultural and alternative-comics conventions (small-time wise guys screw up caper; cute, gun-toting Generation X heroine); and an ending centered on a predictable irony make the work seem slight, if entertaining and well supported by Tommaso's deftly mannered, cartoon-realist drawings. (June)