The Rackets

Fired from the mayor's office, a political flack ends up in his old neighborhood, with a newly dangerous mission Jimmy Dolan should have known better than to shove Frankie Keefe. Keefe may be scum--a corrupt teamster president who's looking forward to crushing Jimmy's father in the next union election--but Jimmy is the mayor's right hand man, and kowtowing to scum is his job. After hearing one too many cracks about his father, Jimmy shoves the union boss onto the floor, in full view of some of the city's most powerful people. In a flash, Jimmy's career is finished. He returns to Inwood, in the wilds of north Manhattan, to pick up the pieces. But when his father is murdered, Jimmy takes up the old man's campaign against Frankie Keefe. It may be suicide, but he's got nothing else to lose. After years in City Hall, Jimmy Dolan is about to learn how ugly New York politics can get.

About the Author :
Thomas Kelly (b. 1960) is the author of three novels set in New York City. Born in New York, Kelly spent ten years as a construction worker and sandhog--working in the subway tunnels beneath the city--before attending Fordham University and Harvard University, where he received a master's degree in public administration. Kelly parlayed his experience in union politics into a job as an advance man for the campaign of New York City mayor David Dinkins, an experience which would form the basis for some of his fiction. Kelly began writing in the mid-1990s, and published his debut, Payback, in 1997. A gritty look at the overlap between construction and the Mafia, it was critically acclaimed and adapted to film by David Mamet. Kelly's other works are The Rackets (2001), which was inspired by Kelly's experience working for City Hall, and Empire Rising (2005), a historical novel about the construction of the Empire State Building.

Review :
"The suspense holds to the end, and the novel draws readers deep into a gritty, wholly convincing world of late-20th-century union halls and construction sites. . . . A strong second effort." --Publishers Weekly "The Rackets is not just a well-paced, violent thriller or an insider's look at construction unions--it's an elegy for the city's old Irish working class, and even for its tangled, unavoidable dealings with the Mafia. It's a song, in other words, for two of the city's old tribes, who eventually, or soon, will disappear." --The New York Times