Who Is Lou Sciortino?: A Novel about Murder, the Movies, and Mafia Family Values

Ottavio Cappellani’s wildly entertaining Mafia comedy takes us into the unhinged world of a family that makes the Sopranos look like the Waltons. As blood-red as a good bottle of Sicilian wine, Who Is Lou Sciortino? is an exhilarating debut from one of Italy’s brightest young talents.

Growing up on the streets of New York, young Lou Sciortino learned many lessons from his grandfather, Don Lou: that whiners are fools; that in order to get respect from other people, you sometimes have to whack a guy; and that the movie business is a perfect place to make dirty money clean. So when young Lou is set up as the head of Starship Pictures, everybody’s happy. That is, until the day a rival Mafia family plants a bomb in their offices. Nobody’s happy after that, especially not Don Lou, who decides to send his grandson to Sicily to stay out of danger; after all, a really nice, decent person like Lou just doesn’t take part in Mafia warfare.

Not long after young Lou goes to work for Uncle Sal Scali—a hapless Mafia boss from Catania who can’t even keep the peace in his own neighborhood—a cop is killed during a routine robbery and young Lou is chosen to bring the situation under control. But there’s someone else Sal has to reckon with: Lou’s grandfather. Don Lou doesn’t like the way things are shaping up in Sicily, and decides it’s time he paid one last visit to the old country. That’s when the bullets really start to fly.