Gangster Nation

It's been two years since legendary Chicago hitman Sal Cupertine disappeared into the guise of Las Vegas Rabbi David Cohen. It's September 2001 and for David, everything is coming up gold: temple membership is on the rise, the new private school is raking it in, and the mortuary and cemetery, where Cohen has been laundering bodies for the mob, is minting cash. But Sal wants out. He's got money stashed in safe-deposit boxes all over the city. He only needs to make it through Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and he'll have enough money to slip away, grab his wife and kid and start afresh. Across the country, former FBI agent Matthew Drew is now running security for a casino outside of Milwaukee, spending his time off stalking members of The Family, looking for vengeance for the murder of his former partner. So when Sal's cousin stumbles into the casino one night, Matthew takes the law into his own hands, starting a chain of events that will have Rabbi Cohen running for his life, trapped in Las Vegas, with the law, society, and the post-9/11 world closing in on him. Gangster Nation is a page-turning examination of the seedy foundations of American life. With the wit and gritty glamour that defines his writing, Goldberg traces how the things we value most in our lives - home, health, even our spiritual lives - have been built on the enterprises of criminals.

Goldberg's new novel is every bit as entertaining and at least as quirky as its predecessor - not an out-and-out comedy but certainly lighter than most books featuring organized crime figures and crazed law enforcers (although there are moments of memorable darkness). The book can be read as an installment in a series or as a stand-alone; Goldberg provides enough background to allow newbies to pick up the important plot threads, a hypnotic and tense read which never lets go, With verbal riffs that echo Pynchon and DeLillo - but funnier - this is hard-boiled violence on an ambitious scale, as hardboiled as noir gets, a litany of brutality and breath-taking cynicism that refuses to nod to the genre's conventions of justice and redemption, Comparisons with the master, Elmore Leonard, are in order and there can be no higher praise

Tod Goldberg is the author of more than a dozen books, including Gangsterland, a finalist for the Hammett Prize; The House of Secrets, which he co-authored with Brad Meltzer; and the crime- tinged novels Living Dead Girl, an LA Times Book Prize finalist, and Fake Liar Cheat, plus five novels in the popular Burn Notice series. He is also the author of the story collection Simplify, a 2006 finalist for the SCIBA Award for Fiction and winner of the Other Voices Short Story Collection Prize, and Other Resort Cities. His essays, journalism, and criticism have appeared in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Las Vegas Weekly, and Best American Essays, and have won five Nevada Press Association Awards. He lives in Indio, California, where he directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside.