Gomorrah, an investigation of the ultraviolent Italian organization known as the Camorra, won Saviano multiple awards; international sales; screen, television, and theater adaptations; and a permanent police escort. Here he uses fiction to portray the new gangs ruling the streets of Naples, kids called the paranze, who love their PlayStations and strut the streets with pistols and AK-47s. A Macmillan Reading Group Selection.

Following the international success of Gomorrah, which dealt with organized crime syndicates in Naples known as the Camorra, Saviano follows a group of ten Neapolitan teens who set out to create their own criminal network, one that is often more ruthless than that of the older bosses. Led by Nicolas Fiorillo, nicknamed Maraja after an exclusive club he wishes to appropriate, the boys start with petty crime and move on to armed robberies, shakedowns, random terroristic shootings, and murder, all while riding their scooters and cursing at one another in dialect (gracefully translated in a novel whose flavor derives in large part from language). Maraja's favorite book is Machiavelli's The Prince, and he quotes Aristotle's dictum that "From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule." Maraja is determined to be in the latter camp. Based on a true story, this novel is appropriately crude and brutal, at times difficult to read because of the teens' barbarity. VERDICT Those who enjoy Mediterranean or Neapolitan noir (Sandrone Dazieri, Massimo Carlotto, Giancarlo de Cataldo) will feel right at home in a world where chaos and vulgarity reign. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/18.]—Ron Terpening, formerly of Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

Famous for his exposé of the Campagnian mafia (Gomorrah), Saviano now offers a novel to color in the outlines, conjuring one bravura personality and the violence he unleashes to gain a piece of the action in Naples. Fifteen-year-old Nicolas Fiorillo is the ruthless ringleader of his paranza, a gang that travels by motor scooter wresting control of concentric neighborhoods from rival gangs among the Camorra. Saviano chronicles the gang's ascent, from sidling up to middlemen to taking over their territory. The reader grows ever more appalled by the boys' increasingly unemotional acts of intimidation and their wanton stirring up of mayhem. Saviano makes clear that the gang's trajectory—from selling hashish to target practice on immigrants—would be impossible without Nicolas, whose Machiavellian behavior toward his family proves no less callous than it is toward his friends. Nicolas is willing to sacrifice people for power, and the denouement of the story is gut-wrenching proof that, for him, the end justifies the means. But the story suffers from too many unrealized characters, as well as the frustrating inclusion of both Italian and English dialogue next to one another in the text. This valiant novelization of an inhumane world is overcrowded and overlong. (Sept.)