Looking Back to the Future

Not to be confused with Anthony Bruno's Bad Guys (p. 494), Izzi's second crime meller is another derivative (of Elmore Leonard, mostly) but scenic dash down Chicago's mean streets. If you're up on your Leonard, you know the score: the tough cop who walks the edge of the law; the quirky psycho killer; a supporting cast of oddballs. Here, it's lone-wolf Jimbo Marino, star of Chicago's elite Organized Crime Task Force, who butts heads against old nemesis GiGi Parnell - the White Heat Killer, a Mafia hit man with a mother fixation whom Jimbo sent up the river ten years before. GiGi reenters Jimbo's life when mobster Mikey Barboza - Jimbo's ostensible boss as he penetrates the mob undercover - asks Jimbo to whack out a just-freed con: GiGi, who is after Barboza's blood for some back pay. To keep GiGi from fingering Jimbo as the law, the cop is pulled out of undercover; but Jimbo - vengeful, both scared of and hating GiGi - won't rest until he tracks down the killer and his mob bosses. As GiGi runs amok through Chicago - stubbing out a cigarette in a girl's eye, killing four (including Barboza and his wife), taking up with a floozie who reminds him of his late lamented mom - Jimbo beds a sexy writer who wants to do a book on him, makes friends with an English sheep dog left him by his ex-wife, trades quips with a deaf pal, and schemes. His crooked plans - including a plot to waste Barboza (Jimbo doesn't know he's dead) - earn him the cold-shoulder of his fellow cops and of a friendly judge; but when he finally offs GiGi in self-defense, and then connives Chicago's #2 mobster into squealing on the Mafia kingpin, all is forgiven - with Jimbo at book's end thinking about how good it felt to be one of the good guys again. Izzi carries the ball fast and hard, only to fumble at the contrived ending; not as smooth a run, then, as his exceptional first novel, The Take (1987), but noteworthy for memorable villain GiGi and for Izzi's ability to burrow deep into Jimbo's prickly, flawed psyche. (Kirkus Reviews)