Works by
Lorenzo Carcaterra
(Writer)

Non-fiction

• A Safe Place (1992)
  On his deathbed, Mario Carcaterra asked his son, Lorenzo, a simple question: "Do you love me?" Lorenzo's answer was equally simple, although heartbreaking. His answer was "No." 
  
  A Safe Place details a relationship startling for its violence and passion, devastating in its psychological ramifications, yet important and even uplifting for its ability to grab hold of and confront the truth. 
  
  At one time, of course, Lorenzo Carcaterra did love his father. Yes, the older man was rough, often shockingly violent -- beating Lorenzo's mother and Lorenzo himself -- but such violence was a way of life in Hell's Kitchen, New York, in the fifties and sixties. And the violence was often tempered with warmth and affection. Lorenzo and his dad sat side by side at the fights at Madison Square Garden, they savored Italian ices on street corners in the summer, they took the subway to the ballpark to root for their beloved Yankees. And then, when Lorenzo was fourteen years old, he learned that his father had murdered his first wife, had smothered her with a pillow in a jealous rage when she threatened to leave him. 
  
  This news shattered Lorenzo. He couldn't look his father in the eye, couldn't respect the man he had respected above all others, couldn't feel love for the man he adored. Worse, he became terrified for his own future: Did he, Lorenzo, have that same murderous rage within him? The question began to haunt him, to dominate his life. And he began to hate his father, a hate that festered and grew as his father became more and more abusive -- to Lorenzo, to Lorenzo's mother, to the world around him. 
  
  A Safe Place is a book of many dimensions. It is an evocative portrait of a time gone by, a time of Italian immigrants standing in fire-hydrant showers in the sweltering New York streets, a time of both great innocence and great fear. The book is also, in many ways, an intimate biography of two people, Lorenzo's parents: his Italian immigrant mother, barely able to speak English, marrying a man she did not really know -- a woman whose American dream turns into the ultimate nightmare; and Lorenzo's father, a con man, a street brawler, a man totally given over to his passions and skewed dreams, a man who ultimately damages everything he has ever loved, including his son, including himself. But it is also a story of hope and reconciliation, as a young boy grows into a man capable of refusing his father's brutal legacy. 
  
  It took decades for Lorenzo Carcaterra to find the strength to explore the stunning truth about his father. A Safe Place is the powerful result.

• Sleepers (1995)
  Sleeper (colloq.): 1. out-of-town hit man who spends the night after a local contract is completed. 2. A juvenile sentenced to serve any period longer than nine months in a state-managed facility.
  
  This is the story of four young boys. Four lifelong friends.
  Intelligent, fun-loving, wise beyond their years, they are inseparable.
  Their potential is unlimited, but they are content to live within the
  closed world of New York City's Hell's Kitchen. And to play as many pranks as they can on the denizens of the street. They never get caught. And they know they never will. 
  
  Until one disastrous summer afternoon.
  
  On that day, what begins as a harmless scheme goes horribly wrong. And the four find themselves facing a year's imprisonment in the Wilkinson Home for Boys. The oldest of them is fifteen, the youngest twelve. What happens to them over the course of that year -- brutal beatings, unimaginable humiliation -- will change their lives forever. 
  
  Years later, one becomes a lawyer. One a reporter. And two have grown up to be murderers, professional hit men. For all of them, the pain and fear of Wilkinson still rages within. Only one thing can erase it. 
  
  Revenge. 
  
  To exact it, they will twist the legal system. Commandeer the courtroom for their agenda. Use the wiles they observed on the streets, the violence they learned at Wilkinson. 
  
  If they get caught this time, they only have one thing left to lose: their lives.
  
  SLEEPERS is the extraordinary true story of four men who take the law into their own hands. It is a searing portrait of a system gone awry and of the people -- some innocent, some not so innocent -- who must suffer the consequences. At the heart of SLEEPERS is a sensational murder trial that ultimately gives devastating, yet exhilarating, proof of street justice and truly defines the meaning of loyalty and love between friends. Told with great humor and compassion, even at its most harrowing, SLEEPERS is an unforgettable reading experience.

Fiction

• Apaches (1997)
  Remember these names. Boomer. Dead-Eye. Pins. Geronimo. Reverend Jim. Mrs. Columbo. They were great cops. The best cops. But they are cops no more. Now they are apaches -- a renegade unit working on their own.
  
  It is the early 1980s. Crack cocaine has made its devastating appearance. Violence is escalating and so is an unnerving lack of morality. Things are happening that have never happened before.
  
  One of those things is the brutal kidnapping of an innocent 12-year-old girl. But the kidnapper has made a deadly mistake. He has brought Boomer Frontieri back to life, back to the streets. And back into action. A New York City detective forced to retire after being wounded in a drug bust, Boomer thirsts to return to the life he loved -- the life of a cop. When an old friend turns to him for help, Boomer has the excuse he needs. And when the simple kidnapping turns into something more, something much more evil, even more horrifying, Boomer realizes that he can once again find a way to serve justice.
  
  There are others like Boomer. Cops who can no longer be cops. He brings them together, bringing them back to life as well. Even as they face almost certain death. APACHES is the story of an extraordinary band of cops. Some might call them criminals. Some might call them heroes. But theirs is a world where good is always shadowed by bad, where right is almost indecipherable from wrong, and where the living can, within mere moments, cross over to the world of the dead.
  
  With this novel, Lorenzo Carcaterra returns to the mean streets he knows so well. And in doing so, he has written an explosive, electrifying, and startling book.

• Gangster (2001)
  Love. Violence. Destiny. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra's new novel like bullets from a machine gun. In GANGSTER, he creates a brutal and brilliant American saga of murder, forgiveness, and redemption.
  
  Born in the midst of tragedy and violence and raised in the shadow of a shocking secret, young Angelo Vestieri chooses to flee both his past and his father to seek a second family -- the criminals who preside over early twentieth-century New York. In his bloody rise from soldier to mob boss, he encounters even more barbaric betrayals -- in friendship, in his brutal business, in love -- yet simultaneously comes to understand the meaning of loyalty, the virtue of relationships, and gains a perspective on the lonely, if powerful, life he has chosen.
  
  As the years pass, as enemies are made and defeated, as wars are fought and won, the old don meets an abandoned boy who needs a parent as much as protection. By taking Gabe under his wing and teaching him everything he knows, Angelo Vestieri will learn, in the winter of his life, which is greater: his love for the boy he cherishes, or his need to be a gangster and to live by the savage rules he helped create.
  
  A sweeping panorama with riveting characters, a unique understanding of the underworld philosophy, and a relentless pace, GANGSTER is a novel that travels through the time of godfathers and goodfellas to our own world of suburban Sopranos. But this is more than just an authentic chronicle of crime. GANGSTER is a compassionate portrait of one man's fight against his fate -- and an unforgettable epic of a family, a city, and a century.

• Street Boys (2002)
  Naples, Italy, during four fateful days in the fall of 1943. The only people left in the shattered, bombed-out city are the lost, abandoned children whose only goal is to survive another day. None could imagine that they would become fearless fighters and the unlikeliest heroes of World War II. They are the warriors immortalized in Lorenzo Carcaterra's riveting STREET BOYS.
  
  It's late September. The war in Europe is almost won. Italy is leaderless. Mussolini already arrested by anti-fascists. The German army has evacuated the city of Naples. Adults, even entire families, have been marched off to work camps or simply sent to their deaths. Now, the German army is moving toward Naples to finish the job. Their chilling instructions are: If the city can't belong to Hitler, it will belong to no one.
  
  No one but the children. Children who have been orphaned or hidden by parents in a last, defiant gesture against the Nazis. Children, some as young as ten years old, armed with just a handful of guns, unexploded bombs, and their own ingenuity. Children who are determined to take on the advancing enemy and save the city -- or die trying.
  
  There is Vincenzo Soldari, a sixteen-year-old history buff who is determined to make history by leading others with courage and self-confidence; Carlo Maldini, a middle-aged drunkard desperate to redeem himself by adding his experience to the raw exuberance of the young fighters; Nunzia Maldini, his nineteen-year-old daughter, who helps her father regain his self-respect -- and loses her heart to an American GI; Corporal Steve Connors, a soldier sent out on reconnaissance, then cut off from his comrades -- with no choice but to aid the street boys; Colonel Rudolph Van Klaus, the proud Nazi commander shamed by his own sadistic mission; and, of course, the dozens of young boys who use their few skills and great heart to try to save their city, their country, and themselves.
  
  In its compassionate portrait of the rootless young, and its pitiless portrayal of the violence that is at once their world and their way out, STREET BOYS continues and deepens Lorenzo Carcaterra's trademark themes. In its awesome scope and pure page-turning excitement, it stands as a stirring tribute to the underdog in us all -- and as a singular addition to the novels about World War II.

• Paradise City (2004)
  As a 15-year-old in New York, Giancarlo Lo Manto learned about injustice the hard way. His father was gunned down by the Camorra, the murderous clan run by Don Nicola Rossi. When his mother moved him back to his family's ancestral home in Naples, Gian found himself face-to-face with the source of the mob's strength.
  
  Today, 23 years later, he is a homicide detective on the Naples police force, the toughest cop on the toughest beat in Europe, dedicated to tearing out the mob at its base. His efforts have not gone unnoticed.
  
  In the highest towers of the most expensive streets of New York City, a plan is hatched to bring Lo Manto back to America -- permanently. When Gian learns his teenage niece has gone missing in Manhattan, the two cities, the two worlds, are set to collide.
  
  Gian's homecoming will be anything but smooth. Someone must always watch his back, and Detective Jennifer Fabini gets the job. A gifted officer with her own personal demons, Jennifer expects Gian to be a peasant from the old country. Instead, the handsome, reserved, unrelenting cop is a revelation: an irritant and a temptation. Together the two must solve a disappearance that seems to be just a kidnapping...but turns out to be a deadly trap.
  
  As they dash from the sun-drenched villages of Italy to the darkest drug dens of New York, their journey links old-world honor and modern-day danger. PARADISE CITY is at once a crime novel and an exploration of Lorenzo Carcaterra's trademark themes: violence and innocence, love and revenge.

• Chasers (2007 release)