Raven

Literature & Fiction

Shana Carrol

Genre Fiction

Sheridan Book Company

Winter Kills is a black comic novel by Richard Condon exploring the assassination of a U.S. President. The novel parallels the real life assassination of John F. Kennedy and the various conspiracy theories that surround the event. Before the main story of the novel begins, U.S. President Timothy Kegan is shot in Philadelphia at Hunt Plaza. The ensuing presidential commission condemns a lone gunman as the killer. The book starts years later, when Kegan's half-brother, Nick, witnesses the death-bed confession of a man claiming to have been part of the 'hit squad'. As the protagonist attempts to find the plotter(s), he encounters numerous groups and persons that could have led or been part of the conspiracy. One person is Lola Camonte, a hostess, lobbyist and fixer. She recounts the story of President Kegan asking her about appointing a member of organized crime to the Court of St. James. The character "Joe Diamond" is the fictional representation of Jack Ruby. Condon's book describes the numerous intertwined threads of the conspiracy, from the Mafia, Cuba, even possible domestic police connections. Only in the final act, in which Nick meets with his vicious and perverse Joseph P. Kennedy-like 'father-figure', is the truth revealed with a twist ending.

Winter Kills

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

CONDON, Richard

Thrillers & Suspense

Rich and Reckless

barney-leason

PIECES OF DREAMS

Charlotte Vale-Allen

Entombed

Guy N. Smith

SCUFFING AT EDGES OF SPINE AND COVERS. MINOR CREASE AT TOP OF BACK COVER. STICKER RESIDUE ON FRONT COVER. NICE BOOK!

Persian Ransom, The

Evelyn Anthony

The Small Party

LILLIAN BECKWITH

Contemporary

Green Hand

About My Fathers Business

<p>Papal history without pomp, circumstance, or spirituality--as chilly novelist Condon (Prizzi's Honor, etc.) details the largely factual 1390-1415 story of Baldassare Cossa, a soldier/pimp/entrepreneur who became mercenary Pope John XXIII. . . and the fatalistic, much-betrayed pawn of rising banker Cosimo di Medici. The off-and-on narrator here is Franco Ellera, Jewish slave to the Cossas, a pirate-family of Naples; and when young Cossa is sent off to Bologna to begin studies for a lawyer/prelate career, Franco goes along as sidekick. But, while rising in academia and Bologna politics, Cossa also pursues his other life--as rake, pimp, thief (stealing a hoard of Papal gold), soldier-of-fortune. An atheist who has never taken holy orders, he becomes a cardinal largely because of his battlefield triumphs in fending off the current pope's enemies. And along the amorous way (317 conquests, not including courtesans), Cossa falls madly in love with two women: Catherine Visconti, wife of the Duke of Milan; and Decima Manovale--the super-courtesan who, working for the Medici Bank, uses her four daughters as bedroom diplomats and plots Cossa's way to the Papacy (as a ""conciliar"" pope to end the church's great Schism, an alternative to the feuding Rome/Avignon pontiffs). With slangy anachronisms and utter cynicism, Condon sometimes offers a bouncy--if only half-convincing--picture of the Church as Mafia. And he does manage to digest large chunks of complex Church-in-Schism history. But no one here, including ruthless-yet-passive Cossa, is even roughly sympathetic; the melodramatic episodes (some purely fictional) get lost amid all the historical detail; and, though free of the verbose stateliness usually found in pope novels, this lowdown, relatively breezy chronicle is more intriguingly informative than richly entertaining.</p>

A Trembling Upon Rome

British & Irish

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