Vincent “The Wolf” Marelli is the head of an international crime syndicate. He has it all, but in a flash loses the most important thing in his life. This is a tragedy for him, but it is also a tragedy for the people who did it since he is now coming for them. The death of The Wolf’s wife and daughters sets off a worldwide war between his crime syndicate and the Russian and Mexican mobs and international terrorists. Under laying this is a battle over the larger philosophy of organized crime: which is better for crime? Calm stability where criminals fly under the radar or chaos and all the opportunities that brings? This war will interweave personal vendettas with the hard-nosed exigencies of the crime world, and it’s unclear who will win.
The main character, Marelli is a Don Corleone like character. He is a crime lord isolated in his own world, pulling everyone else’s strings. Not surprisingly he is a morally ambiguous hero, not afraid to kill thousands to get what he wants. But in spite of that he is a hero that is very approachable for his very isolation and sense of loss. His intelligence and thoughtfulness come through strong and suck the reader in. The book is filled with his musings on life and humanity. You cannot help rooting for him even as he sends people to their deaths.
Marelli’s story is backed up by a plethora of well-developed and complex characters that are slowly introduced into the story. There are the various heads of the different international crime families. There are all the members of the opposition: the Russians, the Mexican’s and the terrorists. Plus all the different law enforcement groups trying to hunt them all down. These characters are presented with enough detail to make them real but not so much that the reader gets weighed down trying to remember them.
There are so many characters in fact that the book could become quite unwieldy, but Carcaterra’s organization takes care of that. Chapters in the book alternate. There is a Wolf chapter narrated by Marelli himself. Then there is a chapter looking one of the other groups of characters which are done in a third person limited point of view. And if you cannot remember everyone, there is a clever persona vita at the front of the book in the form of a criminal file.