"Terrific final tale"

As a youngster named Michael O'Sullivan Jr. he fought with his father against the Chicago mob. However, he changed his name to Michael Satariano and though "legit", the fifty years old fronts for the mob as the head of the Cal- Neva Lodge and Casino in Lake Tahoe. Michael is already thinking of retirement with his beloved spouse. He loves his teenage daughter and worries about his son serving in Nam. Still life is perfect.

That changes when Sam Giancana returns from self-deployed exile in Mexico to regain his job as the Godfather regardless of cost. He orders hits and many people including innocents die. Sam demands Michael kill someone, but he refuses. When the homicide occurs, the evidence points towards Michael. The Feds cut a deal in which he testifies against Sam and will disappear with his family inside the Witness Protection Program in Paradise, Arizona. However, the past is coming for him and he must take to the road just like his dad did, one killing at a time.

This is terrific final tale that grips the audience just like the previous two novels (and movie) did. The story line starts off idyllic as the audience meets the middle age Michael, a former killing machine chip off the old block and his family. He is middle class America circa 1973. When Sam demands being anointed as king of the mob again, the action explodes leading to a High Noon climax. Max Allan Collins is at his best as completes his terrific road trilogy with a triumph and perhaps the audience can coax him into one more for the road.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted January 10, 2006

Summary

Collins chronicled the gripping story of one young boy's travels with his gangster father in the New York Times bestseller Road to Perdition, then led his readers along the unforgettable Road to Purgatory — a tale of this same boy, all grown up. Now, in his most powerful work to date, we again meet Michael Satariano and travel with him as he faces the most difficult and heartbreaking struggle of his life.

Lake Tahoe, 1973: Michael Satariano—who as a young man fought the Capone mob in Chicago—has reached a comfortable middle age, with a loving wife at home, a talented teenage daughter in high school, and a son earning medals in Vietnam. Now running a casino for the mob, Michael thinks he's put his killing days behind him—after all, he's made a respectable life for himself and his family . . . and plenty of money for the boys back in Chicago. So when godfather Sam Giancana orders him to hit a notoriously violent and vulnerable gangster, Michael refuses. But when the hit goes down anyway, Michael is framed for murder; to save his family, he must turn state's witness under the fledgling Witness Protection Program.

Relocated to the supposed safety of Paradise, a tract-housing development in Arizona, Michael soon finds himself facing a wrath so cruel that even the boy raised by a hitman father is unprepared. And with his teenage daughter in tow, Michael must return to the road and a violent way of life he thought he had long left behind.

In this stunning third installment of a trilogy so gripping and masterfully written that it could only come from "[among] the finest crime writers workingtoday" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), we once again have a spellbinding window into a time of heroes and villains — and, above all, a journey along a road on which a man's greatest crimes are all a part of his lifelong struggle for redemption.