Thanks to The Rap Sheet for naming Gangster Nation one of the top crime novels of 2017!

“Rabbi David Cohen, the mobster and hit man once known as Sal Cupertine, is back in Gangster Nation, Tod Goldberg’s follow-up to 2014’s wonderfully over-the-top Gangsterland. It’s now September 2001, and although David/Sal has become firmly ensconced in his Las Vegas synagogue and the profitable doings of the Jewish mob, things aren’t getting any easier for him. An obsessed FBI agent (whose associates Sal had killed) is closing in, the plastic surgery on Sal’s face is failing, and the pain he feels for having abandoned his wife and son in Chicago more than three years ago is becoming unbearable—to the point that the former hit man is planning a return to the Windy City. During his time studying the Torah and ministering to the congregants of his Vegas temple, Sal has become a very sage man, wise about the plights of others … as well as his own. “If Sal Cupertine came to Rabbi David Cohen, what would David tell him?” he muses, as he places his predicament onto a larger stage. Yet Cupertine remains a gangster, working the angles whenever he can, convinced that life (and the new PATRIOT Act) is basically a con and a scam. That’s the kind of jaded thinking that might force a man to make mistakes—just what a fake rabbi can ill afford.”