Road to Purgatory [Hardcover]

Michael O'Sullivan has been living these past years under another name: Michael Satariano. Adopted from the orphanage that Eliot Ness managed to get him placed into after the murder of his father, Michael grew up trying to put the past behind him. He went off to serve his county in the Second World War, only to find that the skills he learned while on the road with his father, such as his ability to kill when it has to be done, have been awakened and built upon. He fights valiantly, losing an eye but gaining a Medal of Honor (he's the first to win one in the war) and a ticket off Bataan. He still wants to serve --- he can fire a gun, even with one eye missing --- but Uncle Sam seems to have other ideas.

At first he obediently goes along with the plans, but his insistence about speaking out against the government pulling out of Bataan, leaving his fellow fighters behind, loses him his active status. Ness, calling him in, offers to get it back, if he goes undercover. The Capone organization has changed since Al went to jail. They've made mistakes, and Frank Nitti, the boss in Al's place who is still supposedly taking orders from the man who now lives in Florida, might be ripe for the fall. Michael is eager to join. His own father went to Capone for help in his vendetta against the men responsible for the death of his wife and Michael's little brother, but instead Capone ordered his death. When he gets next to Nitti, he finds that he might be the lesser of two evils; the man set to take over is a much harder, greedier person. Soon he's trying to figure out where his loyalties lie and how he can stay true to himself while being drawn deeper and deeper into a life that you only leave feet first.

We do have a break in the story to revisit Michael, Sr. This would be an interesting short story in itself, but it has some parallels to the main story that serve to underline what his son is going through. Like Michael, Jr., Michael, Sr. works for a man who treats him like a son. Unlike his own son, he joined because he was desperate to make a good life, and the deeper he gets into the organization, the better the life he has. In both stories, Collins makes a point of saying that individuals such as Capone and John Looney seemed like good people, just giving the working man a chance to have a drink. They also gave immigrants --- Irish, in Looney's case --- an opportunity to succeed in the new world, a place that can be very unforgiving. Both Nitti and Looney treat the O'Sullivans very well and are rewarded --- though tempered, in Michael, Jr.'s case --- with loyalty. As in the main story, we also see that there are people involved who do not dance in the gray area; they undoubtedly are bad people who use their position to gratify their worst desires.

THE ROAD TO PURGATORY mixes the excitement of 1940s mafia life with realism. There are stretches where Michael doesn't have to do anything, and his life is fairly normal. Though we don't experience these moments much, they do act as a lull for Michael, making it easy for him to ignore the reality of where he is. But when the time comes for him to fight, he doesn't hesitate. He is, genuinely, a good man. He avoids the woman he loves, his high school sweetheart, because he doesn't want to involve her in his world, but he does treat well the lady who he takes up with. He is, for the most part, honorable; he's not perfect --- far from it --- but like his father, he has decency at his core. And this book illustrates how a good person can find himself on a road that he simply cannot pull off of.

Fascinating and well-researched, THE ROAD TO PURGATORY gives a true feel for the time while making readers wonder what they would do in the two situations presented here. The answers are not easy.

--- Reviewed by Cindy Lynn Speer

Michael Satariano, formerly Michael O'Sullivan, Jr., son of John Looney's "Angel of Death," has become the one-eyed war hero who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service in Bataan. He is looking to avenge his father's murder by the famous Chicago gangster Al Capone, now released from prison but sequestering himself from all but his most intimate fellows (including acting Outfit boss, Frank Nitti) due to the advanced debilitating effects of syphilis.

To succeed in doing that, Michael will have to infiltrate the highest echelons of the Outfit, using his apparent Sicilian heritage to his benefit (Papa Satariano, his adoptive father, ran a restaurant that was a favorite hangout of Outfit personnel), and with the full knowledge of FBI agent Eliot Ness, who has kept Michael's true identity a secret (and even assisted with his eventual adoption).

Part sequel (Collins considers this a sequel primarily to his Road to Perdition novelization -- the events begin ten years later) and part prequel (four chapters focus on Michael O'Sullivan, Sr.'s, role in a political riot in 1922, his antagonistic relationship with Connor Looney, and the birth of Mike's brother, Peter), Road to Purgatory is, above all, a novel of betrayal. Mike can't seem to keep his word to anyone but himself, not even the too-good-to-be-true hometown girl he left behind when he went to war, and a good deal of the novel's suspense comes from wondering when Frank Nitti, who all but adopts Mike as a surrogate son, will find out the truth. Mike digs himself deeper with each new relationship and things really start to fall apart when someone from his pre-war past resurfaces in the present.

The Chicago gangland of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s is author Max Allan Collins' specialty. Eliot Ness, in particular, has appeared in so many of his novels (specifically this and his Nathan Heller series, as well as his own starring series of novels and other media) that it is almost a surprise when he is absent (like in Collins' Disaster series, like The War of the Worlds Murder, featuring mystery writers as amateur detectives). Luckily, Ness plays a major role in Road to Purgatory (though, with Prohibition over, he's pretty much stuck fighting that other social pariah, venereal disease, giving him yet another connection to Capone).

Collins' characteristic exhaustive research (he even lets us in on the Outfit's "made man" ceremony) adds considerable depth and atmosphere to this not-so-simple revenge tale, the middle story in a saga named after the three parts of Dante's Divine Comedy. He takes the bold step of making Capone and Nitti sympathetic characters and manages to add Nitti's death into the narrative in a way that does not contradict his earlier dramatization of it in his Nathan Heller novel, The Million-Dollar Wound. And the best part is the saga of Michael Satariano is not over yet, and I can't wait to sink my teeth into the final entry of the saga, taking place primarily in the 1970s, Road to Paradise. Fans of the graphic novel of Road to Perdition will also want to seek out the graphic sequel of sorts (really an expansion of the middle), Road to Perdition 2: On the Road.

A decade may have passed since Capone killed his family, but Michael Satariano nee O'Sullivan never forgot even when he though he was lovingly adopted. Now twenty, Michael is on Bataan where he wipes out a Japanese division, loses an eye, but is a survivor of the death march. Michael receives the Congressional Medal of Honor and an honorable discharge.

Back in the States, Michael believes it is time to become the avenging angel of death. Through Papa Satariano, Michael meets Capone's Lieutenant Frank Nitti, who hires him as a welcome addition to the Outfit. Eliot Ness thinks he is exploiting Michael as an insider breaking up Capone's Outfit. As Michael causes destruction, mayhem and death from the inside, back in 1922 in Rhode Island, Michael Sr., the chief enforcer for Irish Godfather John Looney, is about to become a father for the first time, not realizing that the newborn was to become a killing chip off the old block..

This sequel to the ROAD TO PERDITION is an exciting but very bloody suspense crime thriller starring an intriguing protagonist whose soul was sucked out of him a decade earlier. Ironically, Michael's amoral murdering spree as an American soldier and a mob soldier will fascinate readers yet because he is so frozen without even a hint of remorse he is unlikable and the tale fails to show heart. Still this is a solid O'Sullivan next generation entry that contains parallel stories of unaffected 1940s Michael, Jr. vs. the elation of 1920s Michael, Sr. when he becomes a daddy (albeit still a killing machine - must be in the DNA).

Harriet Klausner