The Streets Run Red…and Black

Hard-hitting crime fiction set in the hot, racist, anything-goes New York City of the 1970s.

1970s New York. The Francavilla Family nears extinction, their brutal Mafia reign challenged by the black street gangs they once controlled. Someone new is out there, someone organizing the blacks into a lethal killing machine. The old ways are crumbling. The new ways are worse.

In this bitter, bullet-scarred urban tale of sex, betrayal, and murder, newspaper reporter David Holzman learns a family secret: his father was the mob accountant for Mafia don Vito Francavilla. Now the don is dead, murdered on the Long Island Expressway as he drove into Manhattan.

Vito’s psychopathic son Edward now runs the family, or what’s left of it, and in desperation he strong-arms David into using his newspaper connections to learn who ordered Don Vito shot.

As the Francavilla body count rises, David stumbles upon a street-level confederation of black thugs, pimps, and drug dealers, once loyal to the Francavillas, but now welded into an efficient, ruthless strike force by a mysterious mastermind.

A showdown is coming, a battle for the streets of New York, in which no one is innocent, and from which no one will escape.