Title: The Starlight Club
Author: Joe Corso
Genre: Crime
Age Group: Adult
Rating: 4 stars
Purchase: Amazon
The Starlight Club was jumping . . .
“They looked like mob guys. They had that arrogance exuded by those who liked to intimidate – those who were the proud purveyors of fear.” Amidst the nightly gaiety was the back room, where business deals were made, hits were ordered, and territories were divided. An image of the author is also attached.
Trenchie not being a “rat” is just released from his ten year prison sentence. A new life is waiting – complete with envelopes of money and a steak house to call his own. He finds the woman of his dreams who brings along ex-husband baggage. Hit man Jimmy The Hat finds unexpected fame in the most unlikely of places, yet he always stays true to the “boys”, especially Big Red. “Crazy Joey Gallo” and his brothers break away from the Profaci family and go “rogue, on their own now. They split their gang into several small groups and spread them out over the five boroughs.”
I’m not usually one for maffia movies, or books, but Joe Corso has managed to convey a truthful and believable portrait of mobsters and gangsters in “The Starlight Club“, a book that was apparently never meant to be a series, but turned into one. Considering how well this book was written, and how easily the characters came to life on the pages, that didn’t surprise me.
The book is partially true crime, partially fiction. Some of the characters mentioned are real, others are fictional, but it does give an honest account of what happened during the mob wars in the 1960s. Filled with violence, action, supsense and intrigue, it’s a riveting account of a mobster’s life and the tough choices they had to make to survive.
The writing was spot on, the characters were intriguing and had surprising depth. The pace was high from the start, and didn’t slow down once. The book is well-researched, and some scenes sound so authentic one might wonder if the author had perhaps witnessed them for real.
The only thing that slightly bothered me was that it’s a story within a story. Normally I’d be okay with that, but here, the narrator of the story vanishes for most of the book. We’re not reminded that it’s actually him telling us the story, and he even relates some events that happened while he was not present, or probably not present. All in all, it didn’t bother me that much, but it did turn this from a 4.5 into a 4 star rating.
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