"End of the Izzy trilogy, or is it??"
Reviewed by Sandi Shilhanek
Posted September 21, 2009
Romance Suspense
When I sat down to read the last book in
the Izzy McNeil trilogy I was both excited
and saddened. I was sure I was going to be in for another
good read, and sad to see a series I had enjoyed coming to a
close. Unfortunately, I had trouble staying with RED, WHITE, AND
DEAD. This closing book in a series I had truly enjoyed was
to me not as easy a read, and with the change of scenery
from Chicago to several different Italian locations, and
back to Chicago had me having to work harder to follow the
story line, as well, as why and how basically unemployed
Izzy could afford the trip to Italy. I felt as though Ms.
Caldwell were asking me to suspend reality and stretch my
imagination just a tad too far. For all the issues I had with, there were some
good plot points ass well. Several story lines that had
been subplots in the first two books were nicely finalized,
and I was left with a feeling of satisfaction, yet enough
story line was left dangling that when Ms. Caldwell writes
future stories featuring Izzy and her cast of characters she
can readily weave her stories together, and readers who are
fans should be able to easily remember and enjoy the new
stories. New fans won't be so removed as to have to worry
about reading the beginning of the series to understand the
hows and why in whatever new situation she finds herself is
of Izzy. Overall, I enjoyed the time I spent with Izzy and feel as
though I've gotten to know her quite well, and look forward
to the fact that at sometime in the future I will get to
know her even better.
SUMMARY
A few short months before, I’d juggled three men in my
life, and then suddenly there were none. Today, one was
staging a comeback, and I wasn’t sure what to do about
that. In the meantime I was free to date whoever I wanted.
Even a ranking member of the mafia as part of a part-time
job. Izzy McNeil is hot on the trail of one of Chicago’s most
notorious gangsters. Not that he realizes the crimson-
tressed enchantress, a self-proclaimed “lapsed lawyer,” is
moonlighting as a private investigator. But when an
unexpected run-in trashes Izzy’s cover, she’s swept into
an evil underworld where she is definitely not safe. That
is until Izzy receives help from an unlikely source: the
ultimate guardian angel. And the last person she ever
dreamed she’d see again. Now Izzy is racing from Chicago
to Rome, all the while battling personal demons, Mafiosi
killers and Code Red emergency desires.…
ExcerptChapter One
PART I When it happened, it happened at night, like bizarre things
often do. For a Sunday, and nearly midnight, the restaurant was
buzzing. That’s the way Sundays work in Chicago. Often the
city is quiet; most people tucked under sheets by ten p.m.,
newspapers sprawled on the floor below them. Other times,
on a Sunday in June like that night, when the weather plays
nice—the occasional puffed cloud skimming across a
crystallized blue sky, a sky which gently settles into a
soft black without losing the day’s warmth—Sunday nights
can get a little raucous. And I’m the kind of girl who
likes a raucous Sunday now and again. So even though Rush Street isn’t my usual hangout, if I’d
been surrounded by friends at that corner table at Gibsons
bar, the one by the windows that looked onto the street
where people still strolled and lights still burned, I
would have been very happy. But I wasn’t with friends.
Dez Romano threw his arm over the back of my stool. Dez,
short for Desmond, had deep black hair, even though he was
surely a few years past forty, and it curled in pleasing
twists, like ribbons of ink around his face. The somewhat
thick bridge of his nose was the only coarse thing on Dez
Romano’s face, and he managed to make that look
spectacularly handsome. He was so confident, so lit up with
energy that you began to think every man should have such a
face. The story I’d been told by John Mayburn, the private
investigator I moonlighted for, was that Dez had been named
by his mother after a Catholic cardinal whom she admired.
The religious connotation hadn’t helped. Dez was now the
head of his family business, as in the family business. Dez
was, as Mayburn had said, “the new face of Chicago’s
organized crime.” Dez smiled at me now. I thought a smile by such a man would
be flashy, a surface grin that easily revealed danger
underneath. But it was genuine. Or at least it appeared so.
I’d been told that, in some ways, Dez was the new kind of
Mafia—the kind who had friends from all walks of life
around the city, who opted, when possible, for courting
rather than strong-arming, who made large donations to
charities, not because he or his family business wanted
something from them, but simply because every respectable
business did so. I returned Dez’s smile, thinking that the problem with Dez
wasn’t his looks and it wasn’t that he lacked generosity,
whether toward a woman like me whom he’d met at the bar, a
woman supposedly stood up by a flaky friend, or toward his
associates. The problem was, at least according to the
suspicions of the federal government, Dez ran an intricate
business, an arm of the Italian Camorra, believed to be
more ambitious and more ruthless than the Cosa Nostra
faction made famous by the Godfather movies. In other
words, Dez was also the old kind of mafia. He wasn’t afraid
of strong-arming, or something much more violent, no not at
all. “So, Suzanne,” Dez said, using the alias I’d given
him, “where to from here?” I laughed, looked at my watch. “It’s almost midnight. I’d
say home is where I’m going from here.” “And where is home?” “Old Town,” I answered vaguely. I really did live in Old Town. When Mayburn first taught me
to assume a cover name in order to conduct surveillance, he
told me to always blend in some reality (some truth that
couldn’t be easily tied to your real life) or otherwise
you’d forget or confuse yourself, and you could land in
some very real trouble. The blending of such truths hadn’t exactly helped. My
occasional moonlighting gig for Mayburn had gotten me into
more than a little trouble, but I hadn’t been able to turn
him down this time. I need a favor, Izzy, he said, earlier that night. I want
you to hang out at Gibsons. Act like you’re meeting a
friend at the bar, act like the friend cancelled on you.
Dez Romano is always there on Sunday. Throw that red hair
over your shoulder and give him the famous Izzy McNeil
smile. Talk to him. See if he says anything about Michael
DeSanto. I didn’t say that there was no ‘famous Izzy McNeil smile’
that I knew of. I didn’t point out all the things that
could go wrong with this little ‘favor’. Instead, I agreed
rather quickly. Not because I needed the money, which I
did, but because Mayburn was in love, the first time I’d
witnessed such a thing. And yet it appeared he was about to
lose his beloved to Michael DeSanto, a banker we’d helped
put in jail for laundering money for the Mob. Correction:
laundering money for Dez Romano. “My car is outside,” Dez said. “Let me give you a lift.” “That’s alright. I’m a taxi kind of girl.” I pointed out
the window, where a few Yellow Cabs and Checkers floated
by. “I won’t have a problem. But thank you for dinner.” I
waved at the table toward the bottles of wine and grappa
and the desserts in which we’d barely made a dent. Dez answered that it had been wonderful, that he’d like to
see me again. “I guess I should have asked before,” he
said, with a shy shrug that surprised me. “You’re single,
right?” I answered honestly—“I am.” A few short months before, I’d juggled three men, and then
suddenly there were none. Today, one was staging a
comeback, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. In the
meantime, although I was occasionally tortured about those
who had left my life, I was free to date whomever I wanted.
Even a ranking member of the mafia if only as part-time job. If I hadn’t known who he was and what he did for a living,
I wouldn’t have blinked before agreeing to go out with Dez.
I was about to turn thirty, and with my birthday fast
approaching, it seemed the dating gods had flipped a switch
in my head. I had never dated anyone much older than
myself, never really been interested, but now Dez’s forty-
some years compared to my twenty-nine seemed just fine. Dez leaned his elbows on the green and white table cloth
and shot me a sexy kind of smile over his shoulder. “Would
you go out with me sometime? Officially?” Officially, I was about to say, Sure, This was what Mayburn
had hoped would happen—I would listen for anything having
to do with Michael DeSanto, and if nothing came up, I’d
establish a contact with Dez so I could see him again, so I
might learn something about Michael in the future. I looked out the window once more, thought about how to
phrase my answer. And then I saw him. He was standing across the street at a stop sign, wearing a
blue blazer and a scowl. He glanced at his watch, then up
again, and as the cars slowed, he began to cross the
street, right toward us. I opened my mouth. I must have looked shocked because Dez
followed my gaze. “Hey, it’s DeSanto,” he said fondly. He looked back at me. I clamped my mouth shut and met his eyes, trying to cover
my panic with a bland expression. His eyes narrowed. “You know DeSanto?” “Um…” What to say here? Actually, we met when I was
pretending to be friends with his wife Lucy in order to
sneak into his office and download files to incriminate
him. Isn't that ironic? Mayburn and I had decided that if I was successful tonight
and got to Dez Romano, and if I could somehow steer the
conversation toward Michael DeSanto’s name, I would ask
about Michael, maybe volunteer that I’d once met his wife,
Lucy, (the woman Mayburn was now in love with) at my gym,
or someplace similarly benign. But that plan had assumed I
wouldn’t actually see Michael; it assumed that Michael
wouldn’t pull open the door to Gibsons, and walk right in,
and find me with his buddy, Dez. I stood up. I leaned forward hoping to distract Dez with a
little cleavage. It worked. His narrowed stare relaxed. He
glanced up at me, and, to his credit, kept his eyes there. Meanwhile, my eyes shot toward the door. And there was
Michael DeSanto, stopping to say hello to the maitre‘d. Frig, I thought, attempting to stick with my stop-swearing
campaign despite the circumstances. But I gave up quickly.
Fuck, I thought. What is he doing here? According to Lucy, her wayward husband, Michael DeSanto,
was out of jail on bond, and although he was friendly with
his compatriots of old, like Dez, (all of whom had managed
to avoid prosecution through one loophole or another) he
wasn’t doing business with them anymore. Rarely saw them
much at all. As such, Lucy had felt it her duty, especially
for her kids, to break up with Mayburn and give it a go
with Michael, the father of her children, the man she was,
or at least had been, in love with. And so their Lincoln
Park home once again blazed bright, as did the lights on
the security gates surrounding it. The whole thing had
rendered John Mayburn bordering on positively vacant ,which
spooked me. Which is why I’d found myself agreeing to try
and infiltrate the world of organized crime. Yet now Michael was here, just out of jail, clearly
stopping in to see Dez Romano. And about to come face to
face with the person who was instrumental in putting him in
jail. Me. I took a step away from Dez, muttering, “Be right back.” I moved in the direction of the bathrooms, but when I
realized it would put me in a collision course with
DeSanto, I shifted, started to go the other way. I froze
when I realized the exit and the bathrooms were all just
beyond where Michael was standing. He stopped then—completely still—looking at me with his
eerily light brown eyes. He froze in exactly the same way
an animal does when assessing a dire situation—with the
knowledge that this might be the end, this might be the
time to meet the maker, but with a sure clarity that there
was going to fight before the end came. I froze, too. I wished at that moment that I was better at
this stuff, but no matter how much I’d learned from
Mayburn, the whole undercover thing was simply not in my
blood. And so, lacking anything better to do, I gave Michael
DeSanto the same smile I gave lawyers at Chicago Bar
Association events when I didn’t recognize them—a sort of
Hi; How are you? Good to see you…kind of smile. Physically, DeSanto looked a little like Dez Romano, but he
wasn’t even looking at his friend right now. His intent
stare stayed focused exactly on me. He cocked his head ever
so minutely. His face jutted slightly forward then, as if
straining to understand. And I knew in that minute that it
was one of those situations—he’d recognized me, sort of,
but he couldn’t place me. Yet. I was sure he’d figure it
out any second. I didn’t wait for the wheels to start clicking in his mind.
Instead, I averted my gaze and hightailed it to the right,
then veered back behind him. I glanced across the room at
the front door. It was clotted with a huge group of people
saying goodbyes, giving each other boozy pats on the back.
I could sense Michael turning around to stare at me, and so
I darted up the staircase, and bolted for the bathroom. I panted inside the stall, trying to work it out. Should I
somehow try to say goodbye to Dez? Should I give up on the
infiltration job and just take off for the calm confines of
my condo? It wasn’t much of an infiltration job anyway, just a job
that required chatting up someone at a bar, a task I used
to be rather good at, if I say so myself. However, that
skill had gone rusty over the last few years. Who could
blame me after my series of, shall we say, unfortunate
circumstances—two friends killed and a
disappearing/reappearing fiancé, who was now officially off
the map, causing me to spend a lot of time in my condo
licking my wounds. Eight months ago, I’d been on top of the world—the highest
paid associate at a big, glitzy law firm, en route to
partnership not only with the firm but with my fiancé. And
then poof, all gone, rendering me tired and stunned and
jobless. What I’d been doing for the last few months
consisted of nothing more than feeling guilty about doing
nothing. Shortly, my funds would literally drop to zero, causing my
fears about being forced to sell my Old Town home to become
a reality. And so this request from Mayburn, who believed Michael
DeSanto wasn’t as squeaky clean as he was telling his wife,
led me to Dez Romano. But enough was enough. Heartbroken or
not, Mayburn would understand that I had to get out of
there. I left the bathroom, went down the first flight of stairs,
peeked down the rest of the way, my hands on the silver
banister. I saw no one. The large group appeared to have
left. I trotted down as fast as my high heels would allow,
past the signed photos that plastered the walls—everyone
from local judges to international celebrities seemed to
have autographed a glossy for Gibson’s. My breath was managing only shallow forays into my lungs,
so I stopped once to suck in air. A few more steps and I
was at the bottom, the front door only a few feet away. The maitre‘d gave me a bored nod as if to say a mild good
night. But then he glanced to the right, and a questioning
expression overtook over his face. I peeked to see what he
was looking at. Michael. Across the room, Michael was
talking to Dez, his arms waving, gesturing. Right then, Dez looked over Michael’s shoulder and saw
me. “Hey!” he said, his eyes narrowed in anger. There were only a handful of diners in the restaurant, but
Dez’s voice was loud enough to get everyone’s attention.
They looked at Dez, then at me. Suddenly, Dez and Michael
were on coming toward me, the furious looks on their faces
enough to catapult me into action. I reached down, pulled off my high heels and dashed out the
door onto Rush Street. “Cab!” I yelled, waving at one. But the taxi’s light was
off, and it blew by. Same with the next one and the next. I took off running toward Oak Street, hoping desperately
for the shimmering vision of a cab with its light on. I heard someone shout. Glancing back, I saw Michael and Dez
sprinting after me. Behind them was another man, also
running, his head down, face obscured by a baseball cap.
Was he security for Dez?
I tucked my shoes under my arm and ran faster. When I
reached a tiny alleyway, I dodged down it, running until I
came to a parking garage. “Ticket?” a sleepy valet said. I heard footsteps pounding behind me in the narrow alley.
Frantically, I looked around. The garage’s entrance was on
State Street. I could leave that way, but if I did, surely
Dez and Michael and their muscle would see me and keep up
the chase. To the left, though, was a steep ramp that
quickly curved up and out of sight. If I could get up the
ramp before they reached the garage, I could hide and call
Mayburn for help. I could call the police if I had to. I started in that direction. “Miss!” the valet yelled. “Your ticket?” “My car is up here,” I said, as I kept moving. “No, miss! Only valet here. You have a ticket?” I hesitated for a moment. I thought about reversing and
bolting for State Street, but it would take too much time.
They would see me for sure. Then it dawned that if I kept
running up the ramp, the valet would probably follow me,
which would be a good thing, since he couldn’t tell Dez and
Michael where I’d gone. I was about to start climbing the ramp again, but it was
too late. Dez and Michael pounded into the garage. No sign
of their security guard. Dez and Michael both wore blazers; both had that great
Italian black hair. And both looked like they would very,
very much like to kill me.
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