Published in 2016 when most of you thought the whole mafia-tough guy thing had already been written to the nth degree and there was not much left to tell about that subject, Tommy Red is a fresh exciting take on the subject matter. The set up is that Quinlan King has retired from the organized crime division in New York, sporting a pot belly and gray hair. He has had it with his wife, but drops her off for a week at an island-based art institute in New Hampshire so she is at least out of his hair when lo and behold he spots a guy, Dominick Farese, who should not be there, a mobster who turned state’s evidence. Thinking perhaps his government pension is not enough, especially if he gets divorced, King offers up the rat to Gasper Cirelli, himself an old pot-bellied gray-haired head of a family. And then all hell breaks loose.Getting someone in the witness protection program is a big deal, but a message has to be passed and Cirelli outsources it to a contract hitter, Tommy Dalton. Dalton has his own issues with a nasty divorce to a woman who decides she might as well tell his 22-year-old daughter that he kills people for a living and he, just wanting to be a stand-up guy and take care of his daughters. Dalton is as good as it gets, but he quickly learns that, even if the job gets done right without any fallback, he was always expendable as well as the old guy Doc who put the deal together. This thing is so damn hot that the Cirellis had a plan in motion to take out everyone who even came close to touching it before the deed was even done. And as the bodies start to pile up, law enforcement starts adding things up and there are just too many wiseguys getting offed to solve this simply.Timothy Dalton is a great character and represents the lone wolf out on his own with no one to depend on and everyone against him from the Cirelli mob to the law enforcement officers who are putting two and two together and coming up with him. This contract shooting has blowback on everyone even a little bit involved and no one comes out without wounds – that is, those who survive to live another day.This is without question a top-notch crime fiction tale.