Charlie Opera: A Novel of Crime

...and not serious noir, then you'll likely love this book. If you're a fan of Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake, you'll really love this book. Stella has written several volumes about east cost mobsters and wannabe mobsters and their hijinks. This is one of his funniest. Much like the Ken Bruen/Jason Starr collaborations for Hard Case Crime, the characters are over the top. Stella could have brought them back to earth with a slow moving plot, but like a Berserker on amphetamines, these characters continue to pursue their dreams and hopes without any recognition from the real world that just maybe they should not do whatever their petty desires drive them to do. In fact, they share that quality to an amazing degree with the Bruen/Starr characters. Of course, with that many mobsters, the various federal agencies cannot be far behind. The police are only slightly less inept than the villains in their pursuit and Stella does a great job with the rivalries between the DEA, the FBI, and other law enforcement groups. The east coast mobster dialog is authentic and enjoyable. The only caution I would offer is that characters overlap from Stella novel to Stella novel, and reading them out of order can result in spoilers.

Charlie Opera by Charlie Stella is a reader engaging crime novel which follows the haphazard events of Charlie Pellecchia, a seemingly ordinary man with the ill fortune to cross paths with a New York mobster, the DEA, the FBI, and the Las Vegas police. A veritable organized crime soap opera of seamy characters and their tangled machinations surrounding one man who dared to break a wiseguy's jaw, Charlie Opera is genuinely gripping, vividly written, and totally exciting reading.

Charlie OperaCharlie Stella, Carroll & Graf, $25(308p) ISBN 0-7867-1213-9*(starred)For his third brilliant crime novel, following Jimmy Bench-Press (2002), Stella once again assembles a huge cast of Made Men, DEA and FBI agents, plus local cops and gangstas, hookers and a woman on the run from her abusive husband. Charlie Pellecchia, recently retired from a successful window-washing business, thought a Vegas vacation would offer some fun, a little gambling for him and his wife, but "early the next morning, Charlie woke up in a ditch behind a construction site." Gradually, he learns that the obnoxious guy whose jaw he broke in a New York club is Nicholas Cuccia, nephew of the acting Mafia underboss, that his love for arias has gotten him dubbed "Charlie Opera" by the cops back home, and that his wife is leaving him. "His marriage was over. The sooner he accepted it, the better." To Cuccia and his goons, however, he figures he'll devote a little more effort. Stella's dialogue is electric and funny, as when a hit man asks Cuccia if he really wants him to whack a guy for breaking his jaw. "No," he said, "I want you to whack a guy for forty grand.'" This outing Stella offers us quite a few sympathetic characters, from Charlie and the cocktail waitress he's falling for, to strong-arm men Francone and Lano. You actually feel sorry for the poor New York Mafioso, dropped in Las Vegas like sharks flipped into a pool of piranhas. (Dec 8)

Kirkus ReviewsStella's Goodfellas (Jimmy Bench-Press, 2002, etc.) do their wild and crazy thing once more. All is not harmonious in the Vignieri crime family. Underboss Anthony Cuccia, age 65, is trying to talk his recently made nephew into being sensible. Vendettas are okay, the older and wiser mobster acknowledges, if they don't interfere with business. But Nick has wires in his mouth as the result of a jaw broken by a seriously annoyed husband, and somebody has to pay. What happened was this: Nick attempted to lay claim to a portion of Lisa Pellecchia's anatomy to which he was neither legally nor morally entitled. She slapped him, he shoved her, and Charlie Pellecchia decked him. "He gotta answer for this," Nick intones. Cut from New York to Las Vegas, where opera-loving Charlie and his opera-hating Lisa are vacationing in the hope of repairing rifts in their marriage. Though Nick is indefatigable in his pursuit of vengeance, hit-men just aren't what they used to be, and Charlie proves exceptionally clever besides, good with his hands, and very elusive. Nick's hit-men (think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in sharp suits) fail, and a variety of second-string killers don't kill any better. Still, this is the mob according to Stella, which means body bags will be piled high sooner or later. Violent, brutal at times, but the pace never slows, and you'll like tough, tenderhearted Charlie a lot.

Charlie Stella delivers the goods in CHARLIE OPERA. Readers of his previous crime novels, EDDIE'S WORLD and JIMMY BENCH-PRESS, know how good this guy is, and CHARLIE OPERA reads like his break-out book. Its protagonist, Charlie Pellecchia, is a beleaguered Everyman whose vacation to Las Vegas turns into a very dark comedy of errors. The book is a neon-lit trip through a hall of mirrors where betrayal masquerades as honor, ambition as justice, and revenge as redemption. It's up to Charlie to sort it all out and try to find one true thing. Highly recommended.