Crooks is a riveting tale of a one-of-a-kind crime family’s forty-year run of corruption, scams, transgressions and business dealings. Lou Berney delivers an extraordinary tale that is unlike anything you’ve ever read. It’s engaging, sinful and wickedly entertaining.
This is the story of the Mercurio family. The patriarch is Buddy, a Vegas mob guy, and the matriarch is Lillian, a charming woman with criminal proclivities of her own. After fleeing Vegas to avoid their imminent demise, they surface in Oklahoma City and start a disco that seemingly prints money through legitimate and illegal activity. And their five young children are all involved. Which sets each one off on a different path to either embrace or escape their family’s dark history. Kicking off a trip through four decades that checks in on each member of the family at different times, showing how their past has shaped their future…for better or worse.
The structure of Crooks storytelling is fascinating. It starts with the parents, then shows the family together in their early years, before transitioning to focus on each one of the kids individually at different points in time. The story builds chronologically, but through the actions and exploits of each individual character before moving to the next one at a later date. Allowing for a deep dive into each character, developing their story and showcasing their life choices without interruption or distraction from what the others are up to at that moment. And while there is some overlap of the characters in some of the sections, this book can be viewed as 7 separate short stories that come together to form a complete novel through the common thread of exploring a single family’s life through the years.
It’s a unique method to keep the intrigue levels high and to create a sense of urgency for the reader to want to move forward in order to learn each character’s story. Kudos to Lou Berney for coming up with this concept and executing it so well. It makes for an absorbing and exceedingly interesting reading experience.
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