City of Margins

Starred review from January 6, 2020
Set in South Brooklyn in the early 1990s, this outstanding novel from Boyle (A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself) focuses on a group of people whose lives seem fated to collide with often tragic consequences. Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced ex-cop, now works as an enforcer for a local mobster, Big Time Tommy Ficalora. Widow Rosemarie Baldini struggles to repay a gambling debt that her late husband owed to Ficalora. Rosemarie’s son, Mikey, has dropped out of college and is back in the neighborhood, possibly destined for the kind of strong arm work that got his father murdered. A disturbing note leads Mikey to Donna Rotante, Donnie’s ex-wife, who lives a quiet monastic life with her turntable and records following the suicide of her teenage son. Revenge and retribution follow. Battered by loss and unrealized dreams, Boyle’s characters are vividly drawn and painfully real. Fans of literary crime novelists such as George Pelecanos and Richard Price will be highly rewarded. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc.

Starred review from March 1, 2020

Boyle's latest (after A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself)is another slice of gritty urban noir set in the claustrophobic neighborhoods of Brooklyn in the 1990s and revolves around a ensemble full of big hopes and dashed dreams that wouldn't be out of place in an early Scorsese film. Ex-cop Donnie Parascandolo, who makes ends meet by doing muscle work for the local mob, is rudderless, grieving the loss of his only child, who died by suicide several years ago. His ex-wife, Donna, listens to records alone in her apartment and searches for a connection in life to replace what she lost. Rosemarie Baldini, a widow whose late husband owed money to the mob, frets for her son, Mikey, a schoolteacher who dreams of someday writing a screenplay that will propel him out of the neighborhood and into the big time. VERDICT The author's exquisitely drawn characters soon uncover secrets and make connections with each other that echo those of a Greek tragedy, with similar results. Boyle comfortably stands next to literary crime favorites like Don Winslow, Richard Price, and Lou Berney.--Gregg Winsor, Johnson Cty. Lib., Overland Park, KS

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2020
Boyle follows his road-trip caper novel, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself (2019), with something very different: a dark but moving portrayal of working-class lives that evokes the "kitchen-sink dramas" of such mid-century British novelists as Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1959). Set on the wrong side of Brooklyn in the early 1990s, the action centers on a group of struggling men and women, each dealing with some combination of family tragedy and failed dreams. Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced cop turned strong-arm thug; Ava Bifulco, an overworked widow who accepts a rare act of kindness from Donnie and soon is involved with him; Donnie's ex-wife, Donna, still grieving the suicide of her son; Mikey Baldini, a twentysomething dropout who takes up with the much-older Donna; and several others, each groping toward some form of human connection but watching powerlessly as the violence in their interlocked pasts sets them on an inevitable course toward more violence in the future. Eschewing sentimentality yet still managing to find embers of tenderness in these stunted lives, Boyle blends powerful social realism with a strong noir sensibility.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)