Death in the Family

Death in the Family

by Lanny Larcinese

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GENRE: Crime thriller

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BLURB:

Donny Lentini is a talented young man hungry for his mother's love. To please her, he becomes guardian angel to his mob-wannabe father. When the father is murdered and found with his hands hacked off, Donny is dealt a set of cards in a game called vengeance. The pot is stacked high with chips; the ante, his soul and the lives of loved-ones. With the help of friends—ex-con, defrocked Jesuit Bill Conlon along with former high-school nemesis, Antwyne Claxton—he digs for whether the murder had anything to do with the mob's lust for a real estate parcel owned by the family of Donny's lover. He's new at this game. He doesn't cheat, but plays his cards well. And he gets what he wants.

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EXCERPT:

There is a purity to poker, moments of truth untethered to motive or morals, moments philosophers never examine—clean moments, as when a Great White draws back its lips and embraces a neck in its four-inch serrated teeth—moments neither Dad nor German Kruger understood.  

One by one I looked them in the eye. Everybody dropped except German who raised and called. I flipped my hole cards. “Three cowboys.” Moans from around the table.

I raked in the seven-hundred-dollar pot. Any day I stuck a pencil in German’s eye was a good day.

“What the fuck is it with you?” he said. “You win four, five pots every Friday.”

Dad kicked my shin under the table.

“I know what I’m doing,” I said, clacking chips from one hand to the other. The other guys pushed out their chairs. Dad kept a straight face. In the millisecond his eyes met mine they became beacons warning of dangerous shoals.

German’s pallor couldn’t compete against the crimson flush ringing his flabby neck. He pointed to my father. “You, Carlo, get your ass into my office. And you,” he said, pointing to me, “you need to hear this too.”

He had that same twisted look on his face, the one I first saw two years before when I took him for a thousand fazools over the Superbowl.

He collapsed into his huge leather chair. 

The red on his neck and ears turned a deeper shade as if a chameleon lit onto a cranberry bog. “I’m talkin’ about how you let that fucking union get aholt of office cleaners before you brought ’em to us. You get a piece of that, Carlo? You doin’ shit on the side?” 

A Word With the Author

1.Did you always want to be an author?

It may have always been in the deep recesses of my mind, but I spent most of my adult life in various iterations of business. Despite, I ALWAYS loved communicating—deep communicating—my own inner landscape and that of others. Even while in business my personal letters were multiple pages. I also loved and cultivated language skills. Once I became financially comfortable, writing fiction came natural – at least the language part if not the story-telling part. That took a lot more work!

2.Tell us about the publication of your first book.

The first novel published, I Detest All My Sins, was the second novel written. It ensconsed me as a crime writer with a noirish viewpoint, though not a hard boiled style. By the time I wrote it, I had written short stories and drafted and re-drafted the book that sat in the drawer haunting me, begging me to complete it. In between, I wrote memoir which taught me the charms of writing in the first person. With that, I pulled the book out of the drawer and re-wrote it from third to first person. That book is Death in the Family.

3.Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in?

Peter Blauner in New York. He is also a crime writer, more thriller-like than my work, but I love his beautiful, graceful writing.

4.What's the best part of being an author? The worst?

I have been a man of serial obsessions, some lasting years at a time, each rewarding and gratifying in its own way; my business life was also exciting but nothing, NOTHING, comes close to being a writer. I say prayers at night thanking God for the discovery of this gift—not talent which is not mine to judge—but the pursuit of art. The worst? Simple: marketing.

5.What are you working on now?

My work in progress is a novel called Fire in the Belly, inspired by an actual incident in Philadelphia in 1985 when the police dropped a satchel charge on the headquarters of a weird and militant cult called MOVE. Fourteen people burned to death, including six children, and 62 row houses allowed to burn to the ground.

                                    

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Lanny Larcinese ‘s short work has appeared in magazines and has won a handful of local prizes. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He’s a native mid-westerner transplanted to the City of Brotherly Love where he has been writing fiction for seven years. When not writing, he lets his daughter, Amanda, charm him out of his socks, and works at impressing Jackie, his long-time companion who keeps him honest and laughing—in addition to being his first-line writing critic. He also spends more time than he should on Facebook but feels suitably guilty for it.

https://www.facebook.com/lanny.larcinese

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Family-Lanny-Larcinese-ebook/dp/B07XSLCCL1/

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION 

Lanny Larcinese will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway