Review Summaries

• The novel is valued not only for the tension of its chase but also for the urgency of trapped people seeking another life. It uses the frame of crime fiction while carefully exploring the will to change.

Reviews

• Just About Perfect

  I wasn't sure if LB could top THE LONG AND FARAWAY GONE, but he has. NOVEMBER ROAD is one of my favorite books of 2018 and a very likely Edgar award nominee. This is a quasi-historical road novel. Given its terms it risks becoming claustrophobic but instead stays on the suspenseful straight and narrow and takes you to a moist-eyed ending you will not soon forget. It is November 1963. Frank Guidry is a fixer for the New Orleans mob. His boss has just conspired to kill JFK and Frank is dispatched to Texas to take out the SanFran hit man with the good rifle and bury his getaway car in a Houston canal. The problem is that he will then become a loose end with an abbreviated life span. Charlotte Roy is an Oklahoma housewife with two daughters, an epileptic dog and a drunken husband. She wants to leave the husband behind and take her brood to L.A. where she can stay, for a time, with her aunt, before rebuilding her life. The two link up on the highway, Frank figuring that an instant family will create a far-more-plausible 'disguise' than the usual trappings of a solitary man on the lam. He is headed to Vegas, where, he hopes, an old mobster acquaintance can help him to leave the country. So, off they go, with a hit man following them and who knows what awaiting them in Vegas. Ultimately, as we can expect, Frank and Charlotte will fall for one another, so that the historical/conspiracy/road/mob novel will turn into a shaky, very, very nontraditional romance. The result is crime fiction that is near perfection. LB is a superb writer and the dialogue and narrative are things of beauty. The suspense is unrelenting and the {who's really on our side?} entanglements unending. Prepare for multiple surprises and a very satisfying ending which still partakes of what James Ellroy calls 'tragic realism'. Bottom line: this is the real deal--a lovely book that is certifiably unputdownable. One caveat: the JFK dimension is a little more than incidental but not, ultimately, central. Do not expect something like DeLillo's LIBRA, Ellroy's AMERICAN TABLOID or Stephen King's 11/22/63. Don't miss this one. (And if you haven't yet discovered LB's Shake Bouchon novels, get on to them right away.) And, BTW, if you know what happened to LB's novel, DOUBLE BARREL BLUFF, let me know. It's difficult to track and it doesn't show up on the card page of NOVEMBER ROAD.

• Great read; especially for those interested in the events of 1963 in the U.S.

  I'm less than halfway through reading NOVEMBER ROAD, but I can recommend it to anyone who lived through, or is interested in, the early 1960s era and specifically in the event surrounding the assassination of JFK. Entertaining and engrossing.

• Interesting

  This is a story about Southern organised crime operators in 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated. The assumption is that crime boss Carlos Marcello (a real person) hated Kennedy’s attempts to clean up organised crime and was responsible for the hit, and although the author believes that it was down to Lee Harvey Oswald, he also says that that is what Marcello would have liked us to believe. He makes a credible case for his alternate theory. The charming and amoral Frank Guidry, who has worked for Carlos for years, realises that everyone connected to the job in Dallas is being rubbed out. As the person who delivered the getaway car, and the person tasked with its disposal after, it seems he’s next on the list. Carlos has a long reach, so Frank is hard-pressed as to where, how and to whom he should run. He decides to try Big Ed in Las Vegas. Along the way he meets up with Charlotte, who has taken her life into her hands. She is escaping a drunken husband and terminal boredom in Kentucky, along with her young daughters. To Frank, it’s very strange that he should fall for Charlotte and her girls, but he does, and this of course makes him vulnerable. Hot on the trail is a workmanlike assassin. Lou Berney aka Don Wilson is a seasoned author who knows how to create characters, set scenes and run plots. Suffice to say that the tension rarely abates and you never have the sense of anything forced or too good to be true. There is certainly quite an amount of violence, but unlike other books, it never comes across as purely gratuitous - just the workings of everyday mobsters. The ending is interesting. Having reached the realms of the angels by truly caring for others, Frank makes a noble decision. Full of interesting period detail.

• Cadeau

  Je ne peux rien dire pour le moment c'est un cadeau que je vais offrir bientot

• I can’t praise this book highly enough

  On the 22nd November 1963, the crime of the century that shocked the world was the assassination of President Kennedy. I remember it well. As a child watching the endless news footage replays on my parents’ TV with them. Afterwards it became part of popular culture to be asked ‘where were you when you heard of President Kennedy’s assassination?’ With my parents I watched the news footage of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged perpetrator of murder, shot to death by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner in the Dallas police headquarters. Later the coverage of the funeral of the president. I can remember it all vividly. As I’m sure most of my generation can too. Endless speculation and conspiracy theories unfolded throughout the years about another shooter on the ‘grassy knoll’ has kept the assassination in the news. In this work of fiction by Lou Berney he has used facts and key characters from that time and woven them all into a reconstruction of what may have occurred, who was responsible and what events took place later to cover up the crime. The main character is Frank Guidry, a charming, charismatic lieutenant of New Orleans mafia mob boss Carlos Marcello. Guidry was asked to drive a car up to Dallas. Later he realised that the car may have been used by the killer of President Kennedy. As one by one of Marcello’s employees who may also have been involved and used are killed off, Guidry is fearful of his fate and goes on the run. There is no escaping however the long and deadly arm of Marcello who has contacts everywhere throughout America and uses them in the hunt to catch and silence Guidry On his journey to an escape that will hopefully save his life, Guidry meets up with a woman who along with her young daughter is on a journey of her own, escaping from an unhappy marriage and travelling towards a new life in Los Angeles. Guidry falls in love, something alien to him and he finds himself caring about the fate of mother and daughter. Are they safe travelling with him or will his involvement with them put their lives also in jeopardy? Hunted by a ruthless mob enforcer who is closely following behind them. Their journey to freedom is a tense action packed page turner of a book. I literally could not put this book down. Marcello the mafia boss was in real life one of the suspects of the murder of President Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, his attorney general who had vowed to bring mafia bosses to justice. Robert Kennedy was a thorn in Marcello’s side as he tried to have him deported as an illegal alien. Marcello was freed from one attempt to jail and deport him on the day President Kennedy was killed. He had allegedly remarked to an associate that if he cut of the head of a dog, the tail would die – believed to be alluding to the fact that Robert Kennedy held his important job because of his brother, John Kennedy. I can’t praise this book highly enough. A truly excellent read. Recommended by Don Winslow and brilliantly written by Lou Berney Edgar Award-winning author of The Long and Faraway Gone.

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