The Collaborator-Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator
Gerald Seymour
Overlook, Feb 3 2011, $25.95
ISBN: 9781590204467

In London, Italian Immacolata Borelli attends school for a degree in accounting. When she learns of the death of her best friend Marianna Rossetti from leukemia, Immacolata flies to Naples to attend the funeral. However, Marianna’s grieving raging parents treat her with scorn even spitting on her. They blame their daughter’s death on the Borelli crime family that belongs to the vicious Camorra network of families; her kin controls Naples whose trucks dumped toxic material in the fields and waters.

Immacolata is traumatized by the experience and believes redemption is in order for her implicit failure to acknowledge the harm her family causes. She returns to London where she calls the Palace of Justice in Naples offering her services as an informant turning in her family. Speciale Investigator Mario Castrolami works the Camorra case; he understands the danger Immacolata will face as the mob will kill anyone who betrays them; collateral damage being acceptable. On the other hand Immacolata failed to consider her English boyfriend Eddie Deacon a teacher; as ruthless "Il Pistole" enforces the mob rules, which means killing any informer even the daughter of a cherished leader.

This is a great suspense thriller as the reader anticipates with each spin an OK Corral confrontation on the streets of Naples and perhaps London. Fast-paced with a strong cast on all sides of the law, Immacolata makes the tale as the title character who expects to die but believes she is finally doing the morally correct thing.

Harriet Klausner