"The problem with a lot of first novels is that they start off impressively (often with a terrific opening sentence or first page) and then kind of disintegrate after that. It's easy to write a flashy introduction; harder to keep that pace going for the entire scope of a novel. Fresh Kills is the opposite situation. This book didn't start well, as far as I was concerned. I could happily go my whole life without reading another hard-boiled novel that begins with a tough-guy hero waking up with a hangover, in bed with a mysterious naked broad (somebody else's woman, no less) only to discover that there's been a murder and he's gotta solve it. Sounds like every other mystery story ever told. But Fresh Kills quickly expands past itself, blows away its limiting genre boundaries, and becomes a story of real psychological complexity and emotional realism. Everything about this novel is written with accuracy and honesty. The blue-collar setting of suburban Staten Island--a neighborhood where nobody ever seems to leave, and where people are still fighting out their grammar school battles decades down the line--could not have been drawn more clearly; you can practically smell the landfill down the road (though you wouldn't want to). Our tough-guy hero, John Sanders, isn't a cop or a PI or a gangster, as it turns out, but just a bartender with a string of bad relationships behind him, trying to work out his place in the world. And the murder victim isn't just any local thug; it's John's detested father. In the end, the mystery isn't really so much a whodunit, but more a "what happened?" What happened in the Sanders family over the past thirty years to have turned this whole claninto corpses (living and dead). This is not so much a pulp novel as a story about a life liquefied by grief and violence. I believed every wave of aggression that ran through this story, as well as every delicately unspoken broken-hearted relationship. My only complaint about this book is that it wrapped itself up too quickly and neatly, as though the author suddenly felt he had to put a roof on this thing, and fast. This was the only Amazon Breakthrough novel that I wished had actually been longer. A story of this depth needs and deserves a slow, complex, roiling end--not a tidy one. My advice to the author is to let his next book take its own sweet, sad time."--(Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love)