Gangster Nation was just released in the United Kingdom and is already picking up rave reviews, like this one from the Irish Times:

A sequel to Gangsterland (2014), Tod Goldberg’s Gangster Nation (No Exit Press, €10.99) opens with Sal Cupertine, “the Chicago Family enforcer known as Rain Man”, on the run from the FBI, the Family and the Native American mob and hiding out in Las Vegas, where Sal has adopted the identity of Rabbi David Cohen. Set in 2001, against the backdrop of the consequences of the 9/11 terror attack, Gangster Nation is as hardboiled as noir gets, a litany of brutality and breath-taking cynicism that refuses to nod to the genre’s conventions of justice and redemption. Instead we get Sal quoting liberally from the Torah even as he commits cold-blooded murder and presides over the fake Jewish funerals of victims of crime.

Told from a number of perspectives, including those of Sal’s estranged wife Jennifer, and Matthew Drew, an ex-FBI agent obsessed by revenge, Gangster Nation pulls no punches as it investigates the public’s appetite for crime fiction: “The Mafia built Las Vegas on the bodies of the dead, then Hollywood made that seem glamorous, and then the public made it seem like culture. And a couple of thousand miles away, Nina Drew lay buried in pieces.”