A Quiet Vendetta

by R. J. Ellory

Overview

An epic novel of gangland intrigue from 'one of crime fiction's new stars' [Sunday Telegraph]

When Catherine Ducane disappears in the heart of New Orleans, the local cops react rapidly - she is the daughter of the Governor of Louisiana after all. But the case gets very strange, very quickly. Her bodyguard turns up horribly mutilated in the trunk of a beautiful vintage car and when her kidnapper calls he doesn't want money: he wants time alone with Ray Hartmann, who works for a Washington-based organised crime task force.

All Ray wants to do is get this over with quickly, and go home to try and repair his broken marriage. Instead he must listen to the mysterious kidnapper, an elderly Cuban named Ernesto Perez, who wants to tell him his life story. It's only when he realises that Ernesto has been a brutal hitman for the Mob since the 1950s that things start to come together. But by the time the pieces fall into place, it's already too late...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752877402
Publisher:	Orion Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/08/2006
Edition description:	New
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x 1.37(d)

About the Author

R.J. Ellory is a critically acclaimed author whose novels include the bestselling A Quiet Belief in Angels, which was a Richard & Judy Book Club selection and won the Nouvel Observateur Crime Fiction Prize.

Ellory's novels have been translated into twenty-six languages, and he has won the USA Excellence Award for Best Mystery, the Strand Magazine Best Thriller 2009, the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for A Simple Act of Violence, the St Maur Prize, the Avignon Readers' Prize, the Livre de Poche Award and the Quebec Laureat. He has been shortlisted for a further thirteen awards in numerous countries, including four Daggers from the UK Crime Writers' Association.

Despite the American setting of his novels, Ellory is British and currently lives in England with his wife and son.

To find out more visit www.rjellory.comor follow him on Twitter @rjellory

Editorial Reviews

May well be the best Mafia novel since The Godfather, it's one damn fine book and should be highly recommended to all but the coziest of crime-fiction fans. —Elliott Swanson, Booklist USA

Beautifully written, this is a novel to get lost in, a novel to savor and one that is a long ride into the darkness, and if you recall reading Mario Puzo's The Godfather as a teenager [as I did], then this powerful book will make you relive that memory - Masterful but beware of the brutality, because it comes out of the most literate prose I have read for many years.—Ali Karim, SHOTS

Ellory got his thriller writing off to a good start with Candlemoth and followed up tidily with Ghostheart. This book, though, should propel him right up there to battle it out with the big boys ... a satisfying puzzler, and you'll be turning the pages at a brisk rate.—LADSMAG

With exquisite pace and perfect timing, Ellory has given us a piercing assessment of the nature of love, loyalty and obsessive revenge, not to mention a deep understanding of la cosa nostra.—Matthew Lewin, GUARDIAN

Ellory's entrancing tale weaves the two storylines together, keeping you turning the pages ... this is one of the best mafia reads since Mario Puzo's Godfather—BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY MERCURY

This is a beautifully written, atmospheric novel that warps effectively between a hugely enjoyable thriller and an authentic recreation of the claustrophobic Mob world of brutality and paranoia—TRIBUNE

From the Publisher

The hits keep coming in multiple-murder-master Ellory's (The Anniversary Man, 2010, etc.) latest--literally. It's not so easy in the Big Easy, not in summer, when "the storm drains backed up in the last week of July, and...spilled God-only-knew-what out into the gutters." One of the things they cough up is bodies. As Ellory's tale opens, medical examiner Jim Emerson and a cop with the poetic name of Verlaine are puzzling out one brutal specimen, an investigation instantly complicated by the kidnapping of the governor's daughter. It being Louisiana, the governor is, of course, hopelessly corrupt. Even so, justice is justice, and Ellory conjures up a worthy squad of cops to chase down the bad guy. This being an Ellory tale, though, it's the bad guy who does the chasing--or at least the talking, for more than anything else the kidnapper seems to want only a forum to get a few things off his mind about a decidedly checkered past. He talks--"I was Ernesto Cabrera Perez, a man capable of killing other men, a gifted man, a dangerous man"--and he talks, though the occasionally dorm-room-philosophical gab is pleasingly punctuated by lots of carnage. One wonders whether Ellory has been keeping company with mob assassins himself, to judge by some of the details he presents; suffice it to say that an attentive student could carve out an independent-study curriculum in dealing death from Perez's leisurely account of his adventures, so elegantly delivered that one might imagine the lines having been written for, say, Javier Bardem ("I am here of my own volition, and I assure you I am quite unarmed"). The tale-spinning goes on a little long, and the tale itself untightens in the telling, but Ellory delivers a neat conclusion that's not exactly instant karma, but close enough. It even approaches happy, if you don't mind your happiness--and a lesson in family values--soaked in blood and brains. A satisfying effort in a franchise devoted to double-digit mayhem.

Kirkus Reviews