Howdy folks - it looks like my wife's cousin DeLaura was the 30,000th visitor. Sadly, she doesn't have a blog to promote, but a hearty thanks to her anyway . .
I just knocked off two more books in the last few days, both prose sequels to the Tom Hanks movie Road to Peridition, which began life as a graphic novel.
Both Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise take up the story of Michael O'Sullivan Jr, the boy who accompanied his father on a bloody path of revenge against the Capone era mob. Whereas in the movie the boy forsakes all violence and boasts that he never held a gun again (which I thought odd at the time, given that WWII was right around the corner), in the books he follows his father's path into the mob, albeit with a hitch I won't give away.
Like his father, Michael is a s**t kicker, a man who can be perfectly calm one second and an unstoppable killing machine the next. There's no doubt he's the son of the man once called "The Angel of Death" - heck, in the Pacific he earns the Medal of Honor for single-handedly killing 50 Japanese soldiers in a cold-blooded frenzy.
Purgatory follows him from the war to his apprenticeship in the Frank Nitti mob through Nitti's 'suicide', while Paradise picks up the tale in the '70's, when the 50ish Michael has to account for his past while in the witness protection program.
Max Allan Collins is an underated author who's totally at ease with the printed page. Both books, like his Nathan Heller series, are worth reading. As a slight note of caution, it goes without saying that if violence puts you off, this might not be the ideal reading material for you.
I should read more but I don't have the time. Oh wait, does reading blogs count? Ha! I'm stuck in reading about Italy...Tuscany. I'm into my second book this week about the dreamy country.
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