Fence Jumpers

It was one of those Irish joints, a spot where you sucked down tap beer from paper cups, got loaded, then pulled chicks under the boardwalk. At night, if you got lucky, you could watch JoJo fistfight off-duty cops. Like JoJo and Dante, Jimmy was nineteen, and he loved every hour of every day of each week of his life.

As adults, Dante O'Donnell followed his dead father into the police force; Jimmy Burns, closer than a blood brother, went along. JoJo Paradiso's future was fore ordained: He would be, first, an underboss in his father's crime family, eventually step ping into Salvator Paradiso's shoes. So JoJo is now a criminal who walks the Queens streets freely and doesn't worry about the law.

When Detectives O'Donnell and Burns are assigned to get the goods on JoJo Paradiso, it can't be a simple matter of cop against crook. In their world, there is no black and white-only gray. There are tear ing conflicts, greed, a choice among betray als. And there are secrets that, once out, could rip apart the friendship that since boyhood has been vital to the existence of both Dante and Jimmy.

Bob Leuci knows the ambiguous world of the New York cop better than most; he's lived it. He knows the wiseguy community, from Karl Marx Syracusa, the dwarf hitman, to the widow Rosalina, who scolds old Salvator and cooks up gargantuan and mouthwatering Sicilian meals to strengthen a gang of hoods on their way to a shootout. Leuci doesn't need electronics to create vir tual reality; he takes us to the gritty boule vards of Queens and we know we're there. This is a book to be moved by, to laugh with, and to remember for a very long time.