Ed Dee The Con Man's Daughter

The Con Man's Daughter

Ed Dee

Mysterious, Nov 2003, $23.95, 277 pp.

ISBN: 0892967943

In his fifties and now a grandfather to an elementary school aged child, former prize-fighter Eddie Dunn was once a cop before NYPD fired him and his partner Paulie "the Priest" Caruso. To earn spending money, Eddie worked as a courier for Russian gangster Anatoly Lukin, which gave him insight into mob secrets that still remain genuine though he has been retired for a few years.

Eddie's past resurfaces when someone kidnaps his mid thirties daughter Kate with no obvious motive for the snatch. Eddie believes the abduction is linked to his days working for the Brighton Beach Russian mob with indications that Lukin's rival crime lord Yuri Borodenko is responsible. Eddie reacts in his brawl like manner by firebombing Borodenko's Rolls Royce. Borodenko also prefers fists and bullets first and leaves the severed head of Paulie as a present by Eddie's front door. The battle between these two violent individuals has not quite turned nasty yet, but wait the novel is just beginning.

Fans of gritty realistic violence or just Crime 101 will appreciate Ed Dee's wild tour of New York City where more than a tree grows in Brooklyn. The personal war between the antihero and the thug keeps getting hotter as each one ups the ante and the action. Insider criminal information is also handled for those readers who desire a discourse on a variety of sundry criminal activities (not sure of the social message that provides) which adds to the dark, dirty and seamier side of life on the mean streets of Mr. Dee's New York.

Harriet Klausner