Set among dapper gangsters and Irish cops in Chicago during the days of the St. Valentine Day Massacre, Bruce Barsanti wrote a fast moving, action packed, entertaining suspense thriller filled with plot twists and turns in his novel, “A Civil Man.” He starts with a law graduate, Cris, the son of a cop falling for a beautiful mob princess only to find their lives begin to spiral out of control; what’s left of it, that is. The line in the sand is drawn as the characters posture their machismo, the “mob daddy” and the “good son of a cop” willing to duel to the death over the beautiful woman they both love – in different ways. The plot mechanisms takes unexpected turns, analogous to the impact level of a modern day soap opera, like Days of Our Lives meeting The Untouchables, when death begins to chip away at the cast.
The story moves at lightning speed through the written voice of a tough, confident man that knows how the world turns, understands people, has his destiny predetermined and nobody is going to stop him from getting there. “A Civil Man” has a bit of a Mickey Spillane attitude with some of the Humphrey Bogart tough one-liners. It is a book appropriately embellished in dialogue down to the gangster’s accents. The text, in the electronic version I read, was large with roomy spacing, so I had my finger on the scroll button continuously while my eyes were viewing the action unfolding. In fact, with the adrenaline stirred up inside during some scenes, I found myself scrolling so quickly I thought to myself it reminded me of those old time Flicker Movies having cards flashing sequentially within a viewer showing a black & white silent movie. What fun!
A roller coaster of easily believable characters, where bad things happen to good people, Bruce Barsanti sparks a fire kindled in the reader’s mind. The book is unique in its style yet written within the boundaries of many similar period pieces, popular TV and movie themes. In all fairness, Bruce Barsanti did a marvelous job differentiating his character Crispin from many of the stereotypical heroes of other Chicago early 20th century cops. In essence he brings enjoyable originality to what may be an over-exploited period piece backdrop.
“A Civil Man” is an ideal companion book for a trip where you want to have a good story with fast moving, interesting characters, good dialogue, and lots of sensuality, greed and violence. A story with a dame and a gun, “Here’s looking at you,” said the man in the Fedora.