Bøger af Lorenzo Carcaterra

An unforgettable true story of friendship, loyalty and revenge, set against the unmistakable backdrop of New York CityThey were four boys who shared everything - the laughter and bruises of an impoverished upbringing in New York's West Side.

Nonna Maria, “one of the most charming amateur sleuths ever created” (Tess Gerritsen), sets out to clear her goddaughter’s name and uncover the checkered past of an unidentifiable victim in this transporting mystery from #1 New York Times bestselling author Lorenzo Carcaterra.Nonna Maria has a lot on her plate—and it’s not just fresh pasta. Two crimes have rocked the sun-drenched island of Ischia, and once again the island’s denizens have called upon the espresso-brewing, sage-counsel-giving sleuth.A wealthy woman alleges that a valuable necklace has been stolen from her hotel room. She blames one of the young women working on the cleaning crew as the most likely suspect—a young woman who turns out to be Nonna Maria’s goddaughter. Loretta takes the heat, but privately she proclaims her innocence.Nearby, the body of a woman is found on a curved road near the borough of Barano. The woman is not known to anyone on the island. She has no purse, carries no identification. The one suspect is a young friend of Nonna Maria’s who drove by the area that very night and thinks that he might have hit something—a pothole, or an animal, or maybe the woman in question.It turns out that this woman had a decades-old history on Ischia, but why did she return, and more important, who killed her? It’s up to Nonna Maria to string together the clues—like the links of the beautiful missing necklace—and solve these two mysteries before death comes to Ischia again.

"As Nonna Maria's longtime friend and sometimes colleague, Captain Murino of the Ischian caribineri, never wanted to see harm brought to the doorstep of everyone's favorite espresso-brewing, counseling-giving amateur sleuth. But when you live a long life, you're bound to make a few enemies. And when those enemies come calling, you have to rely on friends. Faced with an assassin seeking revenge for a decades-old grudge, Captain Murino has no choice but to turn to Maria, who will have to use all her neighborly resources, clever faculties, and lifelong friends to save him from his perilous predicament. On the other side of the island, another mystery begins to unfold from the deathbed of another of Maria's old friends, a fruit peddler with a simple life, a man of modest means. Alone with his granddaughter, the man hands her a yellowed letter and tells her of a treasure to be found in one of Ischia's secret caverns, known as the Magician's Cave. There are traps and pits. There will be others with sinister motives who will do all they can in their malicious power to make the unspoken treasure their own. But this letter is a guide, a secret-the only gift he has to give. When the granddaughter needs help cracking the code, she turns to her grandfather's trusted friend, Nonna Maria. From battling foes in medieval castles to exploring the notorious caverns where smugglers hid their goods, Nonna Maria and her friends--some old, some new--embark on their most swashbuckling adventure yet."--

“As nourishing as a three-course Italian feast, this is a fierce, moving tribute to the ties that bind.”—People (Book of the Week)The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sleepers offers a heartfelt homage to the women who taught him courage, kindness, and the power of storytelling: his mother, his grandmother, and his late wife.Standing with his children near his grandmother’s grave on a recent trip to Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples, Lorenzo Carcaterra realized how much of his life has been shaped by the women who taught him how to look for joy and overcome sorrow. This book is his tribute to them.Nonna Maria, his grandmother, gave him his first taste of a loving home during the summers he spent with her as a teenager on Ischia. With her kindness, her humor, and the same formidable strength she employed to make secret trips for food when the Nazis occupied Ischia during World War II, she instilled in him the importance of community, providing shelter for a boy whose home life was difficult.His mother, Raffaela, dealt with daily hardships: a loveless and abusive marriage, the burden of debt, and a life of dread. Though the lessons she taught were harsh, they would drive Lorenzo from the world they shared to the better one she always prayed he would find.The third woman is his wife, Susan, a gifted editor and his professional champion. Their marriage lasted three decades before her death from lung cancer in 2013. While their upbringings were wildly different, their love and friendship never wavered—and neither did her faith in Lorenzo’s talent and potential as a writer.

The most exciting achievement to date from the acclaimed author of Sleepers and Gangster, Paradise City is a riveting thriller of two cops and two countries, a stunning crime novel about the roots of revenge, honor, and evil.As a fifteen-year-old, Giancarlo Lo Manto learned about injustice the hard way. His father was gunned down by the Camorra, the murderous clan run by Don Nicola Rossi. When his mother moved him from New York back to his family's ancestral home in Naples, Gian found himself face-to-face with the source of the mob's strength, the spring that spawned its deadly killers.Today, twenty-three years later, he is a dogged detective on the Naples police force, homicide division, the most dangerous beat in Europe. He is the nemesis of all who export evil, the man who stops it before it spreads overseas. His efforts have not gone unnoticed. "The strength of Naples reinforces the muscle of New York”-and now the two worlds are about to collide.In the highest towers of the most expensive streets of New York City, Pete Rossi, the son of Don Nicola, has decided to bring Gian back to America-permanently. When Gian learns that his teenage niece, Paula, has gone missing in Manhattan, he cancels a much-needed vacation to Capri, to paradise, joking that "one island is just as good as the other.”Gian's homecoming will be anything but smooth. Someone must always watch his back, and Detective Jennifer Fabini gets the job. A gifted officer with her own personal demons, Jennifer thinks she'll be dealing with a peasant from the old country. The handsome, reserved, unrelenting Gian is a revelation: an irritant and a temptation-especially for a woman who has sworn off cops as lovers. Together the two must solve a disappearance that appears to be a kidnapping . . . but turns out to be a deadly trap.As they dash from the sun-struck villages of Italy to the darkest drug dens of New York, their journey links old-world honor and modern-day danger, and ends in a dizzying explosion of the present and the past. Paradise City is Lorenzo Carcaterra's richest entertainment, a book that is at once a sensational crime novel and a provocative exploration of his trademark themes: violence and innocence, love and revenge.

Love. Violence. Destiny. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra's new novel like bullets from a machine gun. In Gangster, he surpasses even his bestselling Sleepers to create a brutal and brilliant American saga of murder, forgiveness, and redemption.Born in the midst of tragedy and violence and raised in the shadow of a shocking secret, young Angelo Vestieri chooses to flee both his past and his father to seek a second family-the criminals who preside over early 20th century New York. In his bloody rise from soldier to mob boss, he encounters ever more barbaric betrayals-in friendship, in his brutal business, in love-yet simultaneously comes to understand the meaning of loyalty, the virtue of relationships, and gains a perspective on the lonely, if powerful, life he has chosen.As the years pass, as enemies are made and defeated, as wars are fought and won, the old don meets an abandoned boy who needs a parent as much as protection. By taking Gabe under his wing and teaching him everything he knows, Angelo Vestieri will learn, in the winter of his life, which is greater: his love for the boy he cherishes, or his need to be a gangster and to live by the savage rules he helped create.A sweeping panoramic with riveting characters, a unique understanding of the underworld philosophy, and a relentless pace, Gangster travels through the time of godfathers and goodfellas to our own world of suburban Sopranos. But this is more than just an authentic chronicle of crime. Setting a new standard for this acclaimed author, Gangster is a compassionate portrait of one man's fight against his fate-and an unforgettable epic of a family, a city, a century.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *; The extraordinary true story of four men who take the law into their own hands. This is the story of four young boys.Four lifelong friends.Intelligent, fun-loving, wise beyond their years, they are inseparable.Their potential is unlimited, but they are content to live within the closed world of New York City's Hell's Kitchen.And to play as many pranks as they can on the denizens of the street.They never get caught.And they know they never will. Until one disastrous summer afternoon. On that day, what begins as a harmless scheme goes horrible wrong.And the four find themselves facing a year's imprisonment in the Wilkinson Home for Boys.The oldest of them is fifteen, the youngest twelve.What happens to them over the course of that yearbrutal beatings, unimaginable humiliationwill change their lives forever. Years later, one has become a lawyer.One a reporter.And two have grown up to be murderers, professional hit men.For all of them, the pain and fear of Wilkinson still rages within.Only one thing can erase it. Revenge. To exact it, they will twist the legal system.Commandeer the courtroom for their agenda.Use the wiles they observed on the streets, the violence they learned at Wilkinson. If they get caught this time, they only have one thing left to lose: their lives. Praise for Sleepers ';Undeniably powerful, an enormously affecting and intensely human story . . . Sleepers is a thriller, to be sure, but it is equally a wistful hymn to another age.'The Washington Post Book World ';A powerful book, hard to forget . . . Carcaterra is an excellent writer, changing pace here and there but never letting the reader go. . . . Sensitive, humorous, and harrowing, featuring dialogue with perfect pitch.'The Denver Post ';A gut-wrenching piece of work . . . [Lorenzo] Carcaterra's graphic narrative grips like gunfire in a dark alley.'The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ';A terrifying account of brutality and retribution, searing in its emotional truth, peopled with murderers, sadists, and thugs, but biblical in its passion and scope.'People

None of their leaders is more evil than Lucia Carney whose drug empire grows and grows at the cost of thousands of lives, many of them innocent ones. With the forces of law and order incapable of breaking the gangs, a new type of enforcement is required;

'IT'S TIME YOU KNEW THE TRUTH, ' 'ABOUT YOUR FATHER. ' 'WHAT ABOUT HIM?' 'HIS FIRST WIFE, ' SHE SAID. ' 'HOW DID SHE DIE?' 'HE MURDERED HER. ' At the age of fourteen Lorenzo Carcaterra made a shocking discovery. Behind closed doors he and his mother survived the erratic, violent outbursts of his father.