Set among dapper gangsters and Irish cops in Chicago during
the days of the St. Valentine Day Massacre, Bruce Barsanti writes a fast
moving, action packed, entertaining suspense thriller filled with plot twists
and turns in his novel, A Civil Man. He begins with a law graduate, Cris, the son
of a cop falling for a beautiful mob princess only to find their lives begin to
spiral out of control; what’s left of it, that is. The line in the sand is drawn as the
characters posture their machismo,
the “Mob daddy” and the “Good son of a cop” willing to duel to the death over
the beauty of a women they both love – in different ways. The plot mechanisms take
an unexpected turn, analogous to the impact level of a modern day soap opera, like Days of Our Lives meeting The Untouchables, when death begins to
chip away at the cast.
The story moves at lightning speed through the written voice
of a tough, confident man that knows how the world turns, understands people,
has his destiny predetermined and nobody is going to stop him from getting
there. Cris joins the Office of
Strategic Services, known as the OSS, the intelligence agency which ultimately
evolved to the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. During WWII Chris is faced with many
challenges in the French theatre which defines the soul of the man he was and is
to become. Returning to his neighborhood
after the war he then must face, once again, “Mob Daddy,” the man that inadvertently
sculpted his destiny.
A Civil Man has a
Mickey Spillane attitude with some of Humphrey Bogart’s tough one-liners. It is a book excellently embellished in
dialogue; detailed down to the appropriate accents. The text, in the electronic version I read,
was large with roomy spacing, so I had my finger on the scroll button
continuously while my eyes were viewing the action unfolding. In fact, with the adrenaline stirred up
inside during some scenes, I found myself scrolling so quickly I thought to
myself it reminded me of those old time Flicker
cards flashing sequentially within a viewer showing a black & white silent
movie. What fun!
A roller coaster of easily believable characters, where bad
things happen to good people, Bruce Barsanti sparks a fire kindled in the reader’s
mind prepared by many similar period pieces of Chicago during the prohibition
and the French Resistance fighters of WWII. In all fairness Bruce Barsanti does a marvelous job differentiating his
character Crispin from many of the stereotypical heroes of other people’s
works. In essence he brings enjoyable
originality to what may be over-exploited period backdrops.
A Civil Man is an
ideal companion book for a trip where you want to have an easy to pick up story
with interesting characters, good dialogue, and lots of sensuality, greed and
violence. A story with memorable
characters defined within the backdrop of war and love, Cris will linger in the
mind of the readers far beyond the close of the book. “Here’s looking at you,” said the man in the
Fedora.
