'Endemic corruption, and the way it holds the fabric of a city together, has never been addressed so sharply. This is tough-guy prose in overdrive, which moves effortlessly from union balls to the morally ambiguous world of Irish racketeers, Italian mobsters and Russian mafia hitmen...a stylish, innovative thriller that shines like a dark sun over the often repetitive landscape of today's crime fiction' Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian Jimmy Dolan is a self-made man. Once a roughneck construction worker, he is now Ivy League educated and working for the New York City mayor. But his fortunes are reversed when he strikes out against a corrupt union boss and is fired. Then his father is muscled out of the race to be president of the Teamsters union by the same man. Filled with mobsters, racketeers and corrupt officials, THE RACKETS is a visceral portrait of New York's underworld and the power games that bind it together.