Amazon.com Review
This is a richly textured, impressive first thriller with links to everything from
Upton Sinclair's pioneering exposes of brutal working conditions to
Mario Puzo's family- oriented crime novels. Set in the 1980s building boom in New York City, it centers on two brothers: Paddy Adare, a former boxer who works for the Irish mobs that control the construction business in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, and his younger brother, Billy, who is trying to pay for law school by digging foundations for the new buildings. It's Italian gangsters fighting Irish ones, workers battling bosses, and brother against brother in a meaty stew of meaningful action.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Sandhogs are construction workers who tunnel underground, digging the pathways used for sewers, transportation, and many other purposes. Patrick McLarty offers a well-paced and gritty narration of Kelly's first novel (LJ 1/97), which involves these workers pitched at the center of a violent labor dispute in which a tyrannical company owner enlists the aid of organized crime. The story follows two brothers, one a sandhog and the other a mob henchman, as they become slowly overwhelmed by the intensity and ruthlessness of the conflict. While the novel is filled with vivid and fascinating details about the life of a construction worker in Reagan-era New York City, inhabited by an extraordinary underworld of dust and darkness and backbreaking toil, the story is otherwise rather conventional, from the stereotypical mobsters to the obvious shots at corporate greed and union corruption. McLarty's reading does endow the two-dimensional characters with lively quirkiness. Still, not recommended.?John Owen, Advanced Micro Devices Lib., Sunnyvale, Cal.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Audio Cassette
edition.
