Thomas Kelly Books In Order

Novels

  1. Payback (1997)
  2. The Rackets (2001)
  3. Empire Rising (2005)

Novels Book Covers

Thomas Kelly Books Overview

Payback

As the wild building boom of the 1980s galvanizes the construction rackets, both the Mafia and the feds stake out territory in New York City’s eternally explosive Hell’s Kitchen, longtime turf of the Irish mob. At the center of the story: two Irish brothers, Paddy and Billy Adare. One is an enforcer for the mob. The other, about to enter law school, works as a sandhog in the tunnels below Manhattan. Important to each other since childhood, they are caught in a crossfire of greed and savage violence that puts their loyalties to family, neighborhood, and each other to a brutal test.

The Rackets

A bare knuckled novel set during a rigged union election in New York City. With The Rackets about construction workers and the mobsters who run their union Thomas Kelly, the most talented urban novelist to come along in a generation, cements his reputation as the heir to James T. Farrell and George V. Higgins. After putting himself through college by working as a day laborer, Jimmy Dolan goes to work for a smug Republican mayor. When he tries to settle an old dispute with his fists, he finds himself out of a job and sought out by Frankie Keefe, the corrupt union boss he knocked to the carpet. Jimmy’s saintly father is running against Keefe for the presidency of the teamsters, and when he is brutally forced out of the running, Jimmy must risk his life and that of his estranged girlfri, Tara, a New York policewoman to def the interests of the rank and file. The novel, set in the union halls, taverns, and half built skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, depicts every shade of New York Irish as well as Italian mobsters, Russian killers, and a gun running Gulf War veteran on disability. But The Rackets is also a vivid and affecting picture of the gritty uptown neighborhood of Inwood and the lives its residents have made for themselves. More than any writer working today, Kelly knows how the players in the city gain and maintain their power; from the ups and downs of the working class, he makes literature.

Empire Rising

A hard hitting urban thriller set during the construction of the Empire State Building. In Empire Rising Thomas Kelly tells a story of love and work, of intrigue and betrayal, with the storytelling verve that led one reviewer to dub him ‘Dostoevsky with a hard hat and lead pipe.’ As the novel opens, it is 1930, and ground has just been broken for the Empire State Building, which rises during the book as if heedless to the Depression that surrounds it. One of the thousands of men working high above the city is Michael Briody, an Irish immigrant torn between his desire to make a new life in America and his pledge to gather money and arms for the Irish republican cause. When he meets Grace Masterson, an alluring artist who is depicting the great skyscraper’s rise from her houseboat on the East River, Briody’s life suddenly turns exhilarating and dangerous, for Grace is also a paramour of Johnny Farrell, Mayor Jimmy Walker’s liaison with Tammany Hall and the underworld. Their story an urban thriller which takes place both in the immigrant neighborhoods of the South Bronx and amidst the swanky nightlife of the ’21’ Club is also a chronicle of the city’s rough passage from a working class enclave to a world class metropolis, and a vivid re imagining of the conflict that pitted the Tammany Hall political machine and its popular mayor, Jimmy Walker, against the boundlessly ambitious Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With Payback and The Rackets Thomas Kelly has shown himself to be a master of the urban thriller. In Empire Rising he takes his work to a new level: in his telling of the story of the people who built the ‘eighth wonder of the world,’ a legendary moment in New York history is brought thrillingly to life.

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