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Summary
Summary
2011 Edgar Award Winner for Best First Novel
Liam Mulligan is as old school as a newspaper man gets. His beat is Providence, Rhode Island, and he knows every street and alley. He knows the priests and prostitutes, the cops and street thugs. He knows the mobsters and politicians--who are pretty much one and the same.
Someone is systematically burning down the neighborhood Mulligan grew up in, people he knows and loves are perishing in the flames, and the public is on the verge of panic. With the whole city of Providence on his back, Mulligan must weed through a wildly colorful array of characters to find the truth.
Author Notes
Bruce DeSilva recently retired from journalism after a 41-year career. Most recently, he was the Associated Press's writing coach, responsible for training AP journalists worldwide. He is now a masters thesis advisor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. He and his wife, the poet Patricia Smith, live in Howell, N.J., with their graddaughter, Mikaila, and a Bernese Mountain Dog named Brady.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The serial torching of Mount Hope, a deteriorating Providence, R.I., neighborhood, sparks an investigative reporter's mission to smoke out the firebug in DeSilva's promising debut. Journalist Liam Mulligan, a Mount Hope native, smells arson in the ashes of tenement fires that have claimed the lives of several friends. The deeper he digs into suspicious circumstances surrounding the blazes, though, the more resistance he meets from police, politicians, landlords, and lawyers. Soon, Mulligan himself is fingered for the fires by the same sleazy authorities he's investigating. Smart-ass Mulligan is a masterpiece of irreverence and street savvy, and DeSilva does a fine job of evoking the seamy side of his beat through the strippers, barkeeps, bookies, and hoodlums who are his confidantes and companions. They all contribute to the well-wrought noirish atmosphere that supports this crime novel's dark denouement. A twist in the tale will keep readers turning the pages until the bitter end. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Born and raised in the Mount Hope section of Providence, Rhode Island, journalist Liam Mulligan won't simply report on the rash of arsons killing lifelong friends and loved ones in his old neighborhood. He wants to know more and launches an investigation, discovering a heavy-handed plot to own Mount Hope in order to redevelop it. Along the way, he's threatened, beaten, arrested on suspicion of arson and murder, suspended from his newspaper, and targeted with a Mob contract on his life. Mulligan must turn to some unlikely allies to save his tired old neighborhood and secure justice. Rogue Island has everything a crime fan could want: a stubborn, street-smart hero with a snarky sense of humor; more than a baker's dozen of engaging characters; a fast-paced plot; a noirish style; a realistic postmillennium newspaper setting; mean, pot-holed streets; and, best of all, a knowing portrait of a small city and a tiny state famous for inept government, jiggery-pokery, and corruption. Debut novelist DeSilva began a four-decade career in journalism as a reporter for the Providence Journal, and his take on the city and state is harsh but also affectionate, as when he describes graft as Rhode Island's leading service industry, noting that it comes in two varieties, good and bad, just like cholesterol. This tremendously entertaining crime novel is definitely one of the best of the year.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
The smallest state bursts with crime, corruption, wisecracks and neo-noir atmosphere in DeSilva's blistering debut.Someone's set seven fires in the Mount Hope section of Providence. Arson for profit is all too common in the city's history, but these buildings were owned by different people and insured by different companies. So Ernie Polecki, indolent Chief Arson Investigator, and his incompetent assistant Roselli, the mayor's cousin, assume that they're the work of a firebug. So do the DiMaggios, the vigilante crew who patrol the nighttime streets with baseball bats. But not seen-it-all reporter Liam Mulligan. His festering ulcer, estrangement from his harpy wife Dorcas and romance with his young Princeton-trained colleague Veronica Tang, who won't have sex with him till he gets tested for HIV, haven't absorbed all his energy. Shrugging off the insistence of city editor Ed Lomax that he file a story on a dog who ran across the country from Oregon to rejoin his relocated owners (a hilarious episode that shows just how desperate his professional situation is), Mulligan homes in on the developing story. His interest is fueled by the number of interested parties he just happens to be close tofrom his prom date Rosella Morelli, now Battalion Chief of the fire department, to his burned-out bookie, Dominic "Whoosh" Zerilliand by the arsonist's apparent determination to torch every structure in Rhode Island's capital. At length the mounting toll includes homes, storefronts, people and Mulligan's questionable peace of mind. When the lead he's supplied investigators goes sour and his own life is threatened, he has no choice but to trust the cub reporter he's been saddled withthe publisher's son, whom he calls Thanks-Dadand the mobsters who'd be perfectly willing to set fires themselves, but who draw the line at killing women and children.Mulligan is the perfect guide to a town in which the only ways to get things done are to be connected to the right people or to grease the right palms.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In DeSilva's impressive first novel, Liam Mulligan, an investigative reporter for a Providence newspaper, is faced with arson fires that already have killed five people. More fires break out as he uncovers a plot to redevelop his old neighborhood. Soon he is under suspicion, beaten, suspended, and threatened by mobsters. Mulligan is a classic hard-boiled sleuth with several twists. His hard-drinking is tempered by an ulcer, he is a loner with a younger girlfriend, and his caustic criticism of Rhode Island graft mixes with his idealism about print journalism. Journalist DeSilva is a 40-year newspaper veteran who began as an investigative reporter in Providence. He combines wit with a fondness for mystery traditions in Mulligan's dogged pursuit of truth. Verdict DeSilva has created wonderfully quirky characters, a tangled plot, and a likable, sarcastic protagonist. Mulligan knows well the mean streets of Providence, the horrors of death by fire, and the betrayal of friends. In the end, not all the villains are caught so one hopes that Mulligan will appear again. Highly recommended.-Roland Person, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 A plow had buried the hydrant under five feet of snow, and it took the crew of Engine Company No. 6 nearly fifteen minutes to find it and dig it out. The first fireman up the ladder to the second-floor bedroom window laid a hand on the aluminum siding and singed his palm through his glove. The five-year-old twins had tried to hide from the flames by crawling under a bed. The fireman who carried the little boy down the ladder wept. The body was black and smoking. The fireman who descended with the little girl had already wrapped her in a sheet. The EMTs slid the children into the back of an ambulance and fishtailed down the rutted street with lights flashing, as if there were still a reason to hurry. The sixteen-year-old babysitter looked catatonic as she watched the taillights disappear in the dark. Battalion Chief Rosella Morelli knocked the icicles off the brim of her fire hat. Then she whacked her gloved fist against the side of the gleaming red pumper. "You counting?" I asked. "Makes nine major house fires in Mount Hope in three months," she said. "And five dead." The neighborhood of Mount Hope, wedged between an old barge canal and the swanky East Side, had been nailed together before the First World War to house the city's swelling class of immigrant mill workers. Even then, decades before the mills closed and the jobs moved to South Carolina on their way to Mexico and Indonesia, it hadn't been much to look at. Now lead paint flaked from the sagging porches of tinderbox triple-deckers. Flimsy cottages, many built without garages or driveways in an age of streetcars and shoe leather, smelled of dry rot in summer and wet rot in winter. Corroding Kenmores and Frigidaires crouched in the weeds that sprouted after the city dynamited the old Nelson Aldrich Junior High, where Mr. McCready first introduced me to Ray Bradbury and John Steinbeck. The neighborhood's straight, narrow streets, many named for varieties of trees that refused to grow there anymore, crisscrossed a gentle slope that offered occasional glimpses of downtown office towers and the marble dome of the statehouse. Real estate agents, fingers crossed behind their backs, called them "vistas." Mount Hope may not have been Providence's best neighborhood, but it wasn't its worst, either. A quarter of the twenty-six hundred families proudly owned their own homes. A community crime watch had cut down on the burglaries. Only 16 percent of the toddlers had lead poisoning from all that peeling paint, darn right healthy compared to the predominantly black and Asian neighborhood of South Providence, where the figure topped 40 percent. And five dead meant business was picking up at Lugo's Mortuary, the neighborhood's biggest legal business now that Deegan's Auto Body had morphed into a chop shop and Marfeo's Used Cars had given way to a heroin dealership. The battalion chief watched her crew aim a jet of water through the twins' bedroom window. "I'm getting real tired of notifying next of kin," she said. "Thank God you haven't lost any of your men." She turned from the smoldering building and hit me with a withering glare, the same one she used to shame me when she caught me cheating at Chutes and Ladders when we were both six years old. "You're saying I should count my blessings?" she said. "Just stay safe, Rosie." The glare softened a little. "Yeah, you too," she said, although in my job the worst that was likely to happen was a paper cut. Two hours later, I sat at the counter in my favorite Providence diner, sipping coffee from a heavy ceramic mug. The coffee was so good that I hated cutting it with so much milk. My ulcer growled that the milk wasn't helping anyway. The mug was smeared with ink from a fresh copy of the city edition. A pit bull, Rhode Island's unofficial state dog, had mauled three toddlers on Atwells Avenue. The latest federal crime statistics had Providence edging out Boston and Los Angeles as the per-capita stolen-car capital of the world. Ruggerio "the Blind Pig" Bruccola, the local mob boss who pretended he was in the vending machine business, was suing the newspaper for printing that he was a mob boss pretending to be in the vending machine business. The state police were investigating game rigging at the state lottery commission. There was so much bad news that a perfectly good bad-news story, the fatal Mount Hope fire, had been forced below the fold on page one. I didn't read that one because I'd written it. I didn't read the others because they made my gut churn. Charlie wiped beef-bloody hands on an apron that might have been white once and topped off my cup. "The hell you been, Mulligan? You smell like a fuckin' ashtray." He didn't expect an answer, and I didn't offer one. He turned back to his work, tearing open two packs of buns. He balanced a dozen of them from wrist to shoulder along his sweat-slicked left arm, slapped in twelve Ball Park franks, and added mustard and sauerkraut. A snack for the overnighters at Narragansett Electric. I took a sip and flipped to the sports page for the spring training news from Fort Myers. Excerpted from Rogue Island by Bruce DeSilva All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.