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The New York Times
A hand is tipped — with a wink — early in this neat little
entertainment when the heroine says, "We're in this together.
Like Hart and Hart," and the hero, her husband, retorts,
"A Thin Man Ripoff." Rick and Rosie Ramsey inherit Nick
and Nora’s romantic repartee, updated to SoHo lofts and
bedroom-ceiling mirrors. Rick is a Connecticut WASP, Tom Selleck
look-alike, with a trust fund, which enables him to buy his wife her
favorite Bloomsbury and Casablanca furniture. Rosie, née Caesare,
is gorgeous, sexy, vulnerable and drivingly ambitious. Rick, out
jogging, finds a severed hand on Mafia territory, and Rosie sees her
chance at a best seller. On this level, the book is sheer fantasy, a
sundae of style, sex and violence (the violence as credible as pro
wrestling, the sex too good to be true). But there are other layers.
A glossy SoHo gallery is haunted by the ghosts of Chinese women who
worked in the fortune cookie sweatshop it used to be; Rosie is at
once a fierce feminist and "an Italian-American Princess,"
raised in the old Soho of Mafia shootouts by an adoring father who
made her "a courageous, manlike, very feminine, very sexual
woman." The Ramseys’ marriage spotlights modern role
confusion and reversal against a dark background of Italian passion
and machismo. The reader shares Rick the straightman's initiation
into the labyrinth of "thinking Italian." Remarkably, none
of this intelligence slows the pace, sours the dippy charm or makes
the plot too plausible.
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Book Description
Author's description: A neat Mafia tale in New York's SoHo
environment!
From The Author, Rosemarie Santini:
A FAST PACED ENTERTAINMENT
I was born in Manhattan's SoHo and remember my grandmother's tales
of the Mafia burying bodies
there. While I carved a reputation as a journalist, the story stuck in my memory. When I decided to
write a novel, I thought, why not use reality? So let me introduce
you...
Meet Rosie Caesare, a young beautiful workaholic craving fame and
fortune. Meet her husband,
Rick Ramsey, whose idea of a workday is jogging to the health club.
Rosie is an Italian-American
Princess who studies the Roman Empire in her spare time. Rick is a Connecticut WASP who lives
on a trust fund. She likes law and order in the universe, and loves
to lecture Rick on modern
marriage and sexual equality. He cries every time he sees
CASABLANCA. Mismatched? Sure. But
deeply, ever so deeply in love!
Rosie's father, Mario Caesare, is a man with a noble, if somewhat
Machiavellian view of life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. He and the rest of the Caesare clan
drive Rick mad with their primitive
rules of pride and passion, rules that never existed in Connecticut.
These rules take on a dangerous
edge when Rick and Rosie and the New York City Police Department try
to solve a murder at the
heart of the infamous Mafia.
If you think THE SOPRANOS is funny, you'll laugh out loud at A SWELL
STYLE OF MURDER.
Thank you for your interest in A SWELL STYLE OF MURDER, the first
book in the RICK &
ROSIE SERIES. If you have any comments, please e-mail me at rosemarie@rosemariesantini.com
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