Lethal Options is meant to be a double entendre, encompassing both the options that people have in life and the mistakes they make in choosing from them, as well as stock options whose promise of quick wealth also can make people choose their fates badlyeven lethally.
Two brothers, Johnny and Tommy Gavella, grow up in a poor immigrant Italian family in a tough city with apparently very different outcomes. Johnny turns to crime at a young age, convinced that this lifestyle is the right one for him, giving him the opportunity to be bold and rich, as well as independent from a family he finds embarrassing and stifling. Precepts that he garners from a fathers tough love and a twisted sense of justice and fairness fuel his drive toward a lifetime of crime. He pursues the company of a gang of young toughs led by Tony Poloso and proves to them that he is worthy of their trust and respect. Eventually, he makes his way to North Carolina, leaving his successful, unlawful career as well as his family behind. Now, eight years later, he is summoned back home because of his mother’s serious illness. During his return, we learn much more about Johnny and his motives, his affair with Tommy’s girlfriend Rosalie, and his surprising provenance. His mother Maria tells him of her youth in Italy and her own passion for a young Baron who was brutally murdered, her revenge on the murderer and the stunning, surprising meaning it has for Johnny.
Tommy wants to emulate his brother while growing up but is forced by Johnny, his family and circumstances to be the legitimate success of the Gavellas. He studies hard, goes to college and ends up with both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees, becoming the Vice President for Research and Development at Calara Pharmaceuticals. Leading an outwardly successful life, he finds himself in debt for a large amount due to a foolish, though perfectly honest, mistake in playing the stock market. In financial desperation, he obtains a loan from Johnny’s old criminal protg Tony Poloso in return for a promise that they would both become extremely wealthy on stock options and a dramatic increase in Tommy’s company’s value when the drug he is developing for them is approved for marketing. However, Tommy knows that the drug has severe safety problems and that the only way it would ever be approved would be to falsify data to make it appear safe and effective. In a clever scheme, he arranges to control the clinical trial for the new drug by essentially inventing patients but covering it up in a manner that appears to be foolproof. Unfortunately, a suspicious friend and a disgruntled employee eventually reveal the scheme and Tommy’s future comes crashing down with attendant, horrible consequences for him as a consequence of his now bad debt to Poloso…
During this time, Johnny is drawn into Tommy’s difficulties and obliged to make some difficult decisions about himself and his future. He is torn by his feelings toward Tommy’s wife Rosalie, his new and shocking knowledge about his mother’s past and his own heritage, and a moral dilemma between his family obligations and a return to a past life that he thought was safely buried.
Love, hate, pride, deception, sex, desire, money and murder, all options that are freely chosen and whose consequences surprise and sadden.
