'Hell's Kitchen Requiem' is a 25,000 word short novel designed for those sitting on a train, plane, or bus with an e-reader, looking for something that moves like a knife through butter, and which refuses to compromise its milieu with forced political-correctness. The book is written in the first-person, past-tense, from the perspective of an Irish American mobster recently paroled from prison, who arrives in New York City seeking to settle an old account, but who finds in the process something that has eluded him for the whole of his miserable existence: Love. The Real Thing. The kind of thing that is incompatible with everything he has stood for in the past, and everything he expected from what was left of his future. Dialog-driven and filled with humor and pathos, 'Hell's Kitchen Requiem' takes no prisoners. Not in its language and not in its unflinching commitment to honesty. There isn't a single false word in the book, no faking or posing of any sort. And no sentence needs to be read twice. A rarity in today's bland and derivative marketplace, 'Hell's Kitchen Requiem', with its no-holds-barred and straight from the gut brand of storytelling, provides a very special and unique two hours worth of reading time.
