William Boyle never fails to write riveting stories that feel wholly original. His characterization is impeccable and his ability to intertwine multiple storylines into one cohesive unit is exquisite. I really must dive into his backlist.

Very good. Boyle has a unique voice and creates imminently interesting characters. I've heard the worlds he creates described as noir, and the tapestry is a mix of gray and black colors for sure.

I admire how Boyle was able to write seemingly separate chapters about various people in 1991 Brooklyn and as the chapters progressed, the reader discovered the connection between the various people. I saw another reviewer describe it as a soap opera, and that is the perfect description. These neighbors are facing a variety of challenging problems.

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission.

William Boyle's City of Margins is a marvelously nuanced study of light and dark, infusing the gritty, melancholy detachment of The Lonely Witness with a dash of the "screwball noir" abounding in A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself. The early 1990s Southern Brooklyn denizens in City of Margins muddle through thinly partitioned lives, toting their loss, hope, desperation and yearning. When chance encounters increase their overlap, perilous links form between people who might otherwise have rubbed against each other without consequence.

Donnie Parascandolo is the epicenter, an emotionally wrecked cop who lost his son and then his wife, Donna. Donnie is connected to Mikey Baldini by a 1991 night of violence that resulted in the death of Mikey's father and left widowed Rosemarie Baldini with a crushing gambling marker held by Big Tommy Ficalora. Two years later, Donnie has been thrown off the force. His surprising new emotional attachment to widow Ava Bifulco is jeopardized when Ava's son recognizes Donnie. Nick dreams of writing the next great mobster screenplay and sees Donnie, rumored muscle for Big Tommy, as his meal ticket. The web of connections thickens when Mikey finds a note leading him to Donna and his ultimate discovery of the explosive truth behind his father's death.

Boyle's love of books and movies that blend crime and comedy wonderfully informs both his style and the bonds among his characters. The arts bridge generations, start conversations and, in Boyle's masterful hands, provide softening, wide-angle lenses to the broken and tortured souls of the margins.

I received a free advance copy of this for review.

Back in the ‘90s, Donnie Parascandolo was a disgraced ex-cooooooppppppp….

And now I offer my sincere apologies to Bojack Horseman, Grouplove, and William Boyle.

Starting over.... In a Brooklyn neighborhood in the ‘90s a group people impact each other in various ways. Donnie was a dirty cop whose son committed suicide, and his wife Donna left him in the aftermath. As part of his grieving process Donnie once hit Mikey Baldini with a baseball bat for trying to hook up with the underage Antonina, and then later when Donnie went to collect a gambling debt from Mikey’s father, Donnie ended up killing the man. A few years after that Mikey has dropped out of college and lives with his clingy mother, Rosemarie, who is still grieving her husband. Donnie has been fired from the cops and works for the local mob guy. Ava is another neighborhood widow living with her alcoholic son Nick who works as a high school teacher but dreams of being a writer.

A couple of chance encounters bring a few of these people together, and the results are….not great for everyone.

As you can tell from that description, there’s a lot going on in this book, and even though it’s not that long the characters and their backstories make for a dense story that explores how these people have already been connected, and how them making new connections with each other triggers a strong of unintended consequences. The strong character work makes you understand everybody’s behavior and choices even if those decisions are frequently bad.

Grief is a big factor here with several characters mourning a dead loved one, and their reactions are varied. Donnie has lost his job as a cop and seems to content to live on booze and cigarettes in his increasingly filthy house. His ex-wife, Donna, has retreated to a shabby apartment where she spends most of her time listening to her record collection and rereading her son’s suicide note. Mikey is completely adrift with no idea of what to even try to do even as his mother is torn between wanting him to get his act together vs. wanting him to stay as her needy son. Ava has become all about her work at a nursing home although she doesn’t enjoy it, and she worries about Nick who seems to have come down with a terminal case of arrested development in the way that he is content to stay with her.

All of this character work is done extremely well by William Boyle, and like his other books, there’s an incredibly rich sense of place and the people. You feel like you know this Brooklyn neighborhood as well as its residents by the end of the book, and he also did a great job with the ‘90s setting by making it seem familiar to someone who lived throughout without ever descending to the nostalgia porn levels. I also caught a few connections to his other books so this feels like getting more history on a place I’ve visited before.

Overall, it’s the epitome of what I look for in a character based crime novel. After reading his three previous books I’ve said that Boyle was quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, and now he sits high on that list.

Having enjoyed "The Irishman," one might think one is in the mood for more wiseguys. Set in south Brooklyn in the early 1990s, City of Margins" is the story of men who are drunk all the time, corrupt cops or mobsters, brutal and violent. The women work their asses off, and few have ever left the neighborhood.

There are enough sparks of connection to keep you reading, but finally, you may be tempted, as I was, to skip to the end to see if any one finds any kind of redemption. I'm sure you can imagine how that goes.

Yes, I can see this as a movie, ad maybe a good one. As a novel, it left me feeling like there was something crawling up my back.

Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader.

Oh .....this book was **GOOD**! I thoroughly enjoyed it....set in Brooklyn,
between 1992 - 1994.
It was dark...
It was gruesome...
It was funny...
It was heartfelt...
It was GREAT - ( hanging on to every word great), STORYTELLING!

“City of Margins” is linked, enmeshed, and intertwined stories—the complementary chapters include a varied-vivid-cast of ‘sad-sacks’ and ‘sinister’ characters. The characters feel ‘real’....( definitely memorable). I cared deeply for them.

Donnie Parascandolo, was a cop until he was fired for punching out his captain. His two buddies, ( drinking buddies), are Sottile and Pags.
Donnie’s aggressive behavior, and heaving drinking, started after, his son, Gabe, hung himself....which lead to a divorce with his wife, Donna.
Donnie started working for the gangster Big Time Tommy.
Several of Donnie’s jobs required physically abusing others.
Donnie even he hit a 20 year old guy, Mikey Baldini, with a ‘bat’ when Mikey was trying to get it on with an underage girl named Antonia Divino one evening in a park.

Mikey was a college drop out - he had a chin tattoo....which he later covered with a full beard. He had stretched ear lobes- was skinny as skinny is - and lived at home with his mother, Rosemarie Baldini.
Rosemarie was 46 years old... her husband had died two years ago from suicide ( jumping off a bridge, leaving a huge gambling debt -to a Big Time Tommy).

Here’s a sample scene between Mikey, ( tomorrow was his 21st birthday), and his mother...( comic/tragic)....that made me laugh.
Rosemarie tells Mikey, that his Uncle Alberto, was coming to dinner tomorrow. She’s making his favorite foods, ravioli with chicken parm and garlic bread. Uncle Alberto was bringing cannoli.
Mikey says:
“Who’re you feeding here?”
“Uncle Alberto likes to eat”.
“You should bring all this food to a homeless shelter”.
“Homeless Shelter? What’re are you saying? It’s your birthday. These are your favorites. You can at least eat on your birthday, can’t you?”
“Feed people who need to be fed, that’s what I’m saying”.
“You need to be feed!” EAT!!!
Boy, does Mikey ever eat... I was laughing out loud at what follows next.
.....(note: I’ve no appetite for macaroni). Funny scene....( several scenes were a giggling riot).

Mikey was almost never hungry anymore. Rosemarie worrier he was getting too skinny. Mikey doesn’t think his mother knows he drinks much, but she does. MOM’S HAVE EYES BEHIND THERE HEADS!

Several of the scenes that had me laughing were between mom & son.

Here’s another scene that had me laughing between a single mother,
Ava Bifulo, ( her husband died of pancreatic cancer a couple years ago) and her son, Nick.
.....[note: minutes before Ava came walking in the door with a guy name Don, the same ex-cop, Don, from earlier linking-chapters,
Nick was having phone sex with his longtime girlfriend, Alice....but Nick is in no hurry to marry]
Nick and Alice were both teachers - teaching at the same school.
Here’s the scene that had me laughing again:
Small talk was taking place while Ava prepared dinner for Don, and Nick.
Ava says to Don...
“He ( referring to Nick), still doesn’t want to get married. I tell him, ‘you better be careful’. She’s not going to be young forever. You’re not going to be young forever”.
“What can I say?, Nick says. I like living at home with my mother. I like the home-cooking”.
“He can eat, God bless him, Ava says, but he stay so skinny. How about you, Don? Do you like to eat?”
“I could take it or leave it, Don says
“Take or leave eating?, Nick says.”
“You know, I do it. I grab a roll here a slice of pizza there. I don’t really think about it”.
“To each his own, Ava says”.
The scene continues....( pathetically sad and funny)....

Antonino, only 15 years old, who we met earlier when she was in the park one night with Mikey, wants to go to college and leave Brooklyn. She has an odd relationship with an older man name Ralph, who gives her money to set aside for college. He takes her to dinner and drives Antonino around - but thankfully he never abused her sexually or emotionally. Ralph actually saw Antonino like a daughter.
There was a sadness about their connecting together - for both of them....yet, the longing seemed to fill a void for loneliness.

Donnie started going by the name Don, after he was fired.
Donna took back her maiden name, Rotante...(Donna still lived in the same neighborhood - close by her ex-husband).
Both Don and Donna were seriously hurting and distraught from their son’s suicide.
Don’s antidote to the grief of Gabe, which he didn’t want to talk about, was working as a gangster for Big Time Tommy.

There’s a lot going on with all these characters.... surprisingly very easy to follow...
Think of ‘The Sopranos’....a bunch of Italian dudes, ....( some good, some very bad)....crime and corruption, lost souls, hurting, looking for revenge and love.
Think of women who are affected by these guys...( ex husbands, sons, and friends).

Somehow, in this textured crime novel...I got the feeling that goodness prevails.
It takes one heck of a talented author for me to feel so much warmth - in a novel with violence - which I did - for both the good guys and losers.

Love, loss, crime, and more love....
William Boyle’s novel is emotionally felt....haunting, yet utterly real....superbly written with a marvelous tantalizing thriller soul.

Thank you netgalley, Pegasus Books, and William Boyle.

William Boyle’s, City of Margins out next year is a complex Greek tragedy transplanted to Brooklyn in the 90’s. The wonderful Italian characters who inhabit the story are finely drawn and capture your heart as their lives interact in unpredictable ways that include pathos, comedy, love and death. I slowly savoured every word of this seriously good genre breaking novel. You’ll have to wait until March but don’t miss this one. William Boyle’s books are all great and this is his best yet. It’s already on my list of best books of next year. Loved it.

From the first page of City of Margins, you know you've found something special. Well, to be honest, you've struck a huge vein of gold. Boyle offers us a gritty Brooklyn crime fiction set in the nineties but somehow echoing books and movies set in earlier eras.

You've got the dirty corrupt cops, including one so twisted they kicked him off the force, Donnie. And Donnie, like any great Noir character, has only just begun to travel through the circles of hell. His marriage didn't survive his teenage son's suicide and he's little more than a mean-spirited enforcer for a loan shark, even prone to throwing the marks off bridges. His ex-wife Donna is practically a shut-in with her stacks of record albums. You got the family torn apart by the father's apparent suicide off a bridge and a family debt to a loan shark that won't go away. Mikey's going nowhere fast, but he's somehow linked up with Donnie and Donna too. Meanwhile, Donnie plays Good Samaritan to Ava whose loser son is planning to write a novel or movie treatment about neighborhood character Donnie.

All these people stuck in dead end lives going nowhere, never leaving their neighborhood and all linked by strange connections. It's a soap opera, gritty Noir style and every page is worth devouring. Well-paced, well-written. Done right.