Road to Purgatory by Max Allan Collins

From the Publisher

The powerful prose sequel to the acclaimed graphic novel, Road to Perdition, the basis for the Oscar-winning 2002 motion picture, starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. An epic crime novel with love, betrayal, and family reminiscent of The Godfather.

ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE - Jon Breen

This fine blood-drenched account of events before and after the action of Road to Perdition ranges from Bataan, the Philippines, in 1942, where Michael Satariano (né O'Sullivan) loses an eye in battle and earns a Congressional Medal of Honor, to Chicago in 1942 and 1943, where he goes undercover in the mob at the behest of Eliot Ness, to the Tri-Cities in 1922 and more O'Sullivan family history. Collins's customary bibliographic essay specifies what's real and what invented.

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES</P> - David J. Montgomery

Max Allan Collins' Road to Purgatory is a sequel in novel form to the acclaimed Tom Hanks film "Road to Perdition," in turn based on a graphic novel by Collins.

The story begins with Michael O'Sullivan Jr. (the boy from the first tale, now in his early 20s) serving in combat in World War II. With his fearlessness and capacity for violence-his father was a mob hit man-

Michael is a formidable soldier. After being maimed in combat, he is discharged from the hospital and sent home to Chicago. Finding himself at loose ends, he is recruited by Eliot Ness to go undercover to help the G-man bring down the Capone mob.

Michael proves himself to be just as good a soldier in the Outfit as he was in the Army. He soon crosses the line, though, becoming more like his father than he ever thought he would be, a point driven home in a flashback featuring Michael Sr.

Nobody writes about war era crime in Chicago as well as Collins. With its fascinating period narrative and affecting intergenerational story, Road to Purgatory is a delight for fans of the original story and newcomers as well.

BOOKLIST - Wes Lukowsky

After earning the Medal of Honor in Bataan, Michael Satariano (aka Michael O'Sullivan Jr.) returned to the U.S and took an undercover position as a chauffer with Frank Nitti, the acting capo of the Chicago Mob. Michael's actual boss is legendary crime fighter Elliot Ness. Michael's motivation is simple: as a child he watched as his father, the infamous Angel of Death, Michael O'Sullivan, was shot by a Capone hit man. Ness hopes to revive his flagging career by exploiting Michael's obsession with revenge. But Ness' plan goes awry when Michael bonds with Nitti, who bestows upon Michael the status of "made man." This prose sequel to Road to Perdition (1998), the graphic novel that inspired the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, is familiar ground for Collins, who populates his Shamus Award-winning Nate Heller crime series with many of the real-life mobsters portrayed here. Collins is a consummate storyteller, and in Michael Satariano, he has created a character trapped in a cordite-drenched Shakespearean tragedy from which he is unable-or possibly unwilling-to escape.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY - Marc Bernadin

Collins thrillingly revisits the impeccably researched "pulp-faction" world he created - and director Sam Mendes adapted - in the graphic novel ROAD TO PERDITION, telling parallel prose tales of father and son, each wrestling with issues of duty and destiny....PURGATORY succeeds in putting us inside the head of an honorable man descending into a hell of his own creation.

Publishers Weekly

When you're dealing with the straight-text sequel to a bestselling American graphic novel, Road to Perdition (2002), which became a memorable Tom Hanks movie, the words take on extra significance. Luckily, Collins is, among his other talents, a dedicated word man, the author of dozens of sharply written and impeccably researched mysteries and thrillers. In 1942, Michael O'Sullivan Jr.-the wide-eyed boy who watched his father turn into an angel of vengeance-is now grown up and about to become a WWII hero in the savage battle for Bataan. Raised by Italian-American adopted parents, Michael Satariano (as he's now named) then returns to America to continue his father's one-man war on the Capone mob by working his way up inside it. Michael hits it off with Frank Nitti, Al's successor (played so well by Stanley Tucci in the film version of Perdition that he should be signed immediately for the sequel). Then there's a touching and frightening flashback to 1922, when Michael Sullivan Sr. covers up a crime by the son of his own mentor, John Looney. Collins ranges over a lot of ground, and his writing is most vivid when he describes visual exteriors rather than mental interiors. But the complete package is so smooth and imaginative that few will find it more graphic than novelistic. Agent, Dominick Abel. (Dec. 1) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

(See Prepub Mystery, LJ 8/05) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The Angel of Death is dead, but his spirit of vengeance lives on in his war-hero son, back to get revenge on the Chicago Outfit-again. We're now in the middle stretch of the trilogy that Collins spun out of his 1998 graphic novel, Road to Perdition (dourly filmed four years later by Sam Mendes, with Tom Hanks and Paul Newman), then wrote into a novelization. With this sequel (to be concluded, we're told, with Road to Paradise), Collins extends the story of the O'Sullivan clan, previously decimated by mob warfare and now represented only by Michael O'Sullivan, adopted and given the last name Satariano, and still remembering what Capone's henchmen did to his family. Michael grew up to be just as much a stone-cold killer as his old man, as proven in the story's bloody introduction, set on Bataan, where Michael guns down a division's worth of Japanese soldiers. He loses an eye but gains a Medal of Honor and honorable discharge back to the states, where he doesn't lose any time getting into the mix. Papa Satariano gets him a meeting with Capone's right-hand man, Frank Nitti, who welcomes the very useful Michael into the belly of the Outfit. Simultaneously, Michael is supposed to be doing his civic duty, as laid out for him during a meeting with Eliot Ness-star of a series of pulp novels that Collins wrote some years ago-who wants help breaking up the Outfit led by Capone from his Florida mansion. A long flashback fills in background on Michael's family origins back in Rock Island, and it's a pleasant relief from Collins's tiresome way, elsewhere, of imagining Michael as a rock-jawed, two-dimensional caricature. Collins clearly wants to be Mickey Spillane, and there's plenty of blazing .45action to satisfy lovers of that sort of thing. But without the robotic Michael possessing a single human emotion, it's hard to care much what happens. Agent: Dominick Abel/Dominick Abel Associates

Product Details

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Patsy Ann O'Hara unquestionably the prettiest coed on the Northern State Teachers' College campus, did not have a date for the Fourth of July.

Apple-cheeked, strawberry blonde, her heart-shaped face blessed with Shirley Temple dimples, a beauty mark near her full lips, her big long-lashed dark blue eyes accented by full dark (cautiously plucked) eyebrows, her five-foot-five figure one that Lana Turner would find familiar, Patsy Ann had been a stunning beauty for so many years, she never thought about it really, other than to carefully maintain this gift from God.

The former Homecoming Queen of DeKalb Township High (class of '38) considered herself more conscientious than vain -- meticulous about her grooming, maintaining an exercise regimen, avoiding excess sweets and too much sun, her selection of clothing as exacting as a five-star chef choosing just the right ingredients for a gourmet meal (before shortages, anyway).

Today she had selected an appropriately patriotic red-andwhite- checked cotton sundress, its ruffled trim at both bodice and skirt accentuating her just-full-enough bosom and her Grable-esque gams, further set off by red-white-and-blue opentoed wedge-heeled sandals. The outfit perhaps seemed a trifle young—she was, after all, twenty-one ...

... but she wanted to look like a high school girl today, or at least invoke one, even if doing so risked occasional askance glances or even envious ridicule from females who never had looked this good, not even in high school.

Anyway, the men would like it ... though she only cared about the reaction of one specific man sure to be at the festivities today ...

None of the panting males at Northern State Teachers' College had even bothered to ask Patsy Ann out for the Fourth. This had nothing to do with a shortage of men -- fully half the enrollment was male, ranging from 4-F's to guys waiting for Uncle Sam's inevitable "greetings," as well as a number who'd received deferments. They had long since stopped trying, knowing she was "taken."

The first several years at Northern, she'd been dating her high school boyfriend; and ever since her guy had joined the army and gone off to fight in the Philippines, Patsy Ann had been steadfastly true, a college woman wearing the high-school class ring of her overseas beau. Frustrated as some of the guys at Northern might be, they admired her for this loyalty -- so did even the cattiest females on campus.

No one but Patsy Ann's young sister -- little Betty, who was a high school senior already! -- knew the truth; not even Mom and Dad. No one but Betty knew that Mike had broken it off with Patsy Ann before he went away, that he had kissed her tenderly and told her not to wait for him.

"Forget about me," he said.

"You can't be serious, Michael ... "

But he was almost always serious.

"A war's coming," he said. "I'm not going to put you in that position."

She'd felt flushed with emotion, some of it anger. "Doesn't my opinion count in this?"

"No," he said.

But she knew he didn't mean that. She knew he was trying to get her mad at him, to help break it off ...

She'd penned a letter to him every day. He had not sent a single reply, or at least none had made it back to her. And yet month upon month, she wrote to Mike, staring at his framed Senior picture, suffering in stoic, noble silence, an English Lit major wholly unaware that her love of romantic literature was influencing her behavior.

When she learned of Mike's breathtaking heroism, and that he was coming home, Patsy Ann had gone to Pasquale's Spaghetti House to see if Papa and Mama Satariano had an address for him. They did -- their son was at St. Elizabeth's Hospital near Washington, D.C.

When he didn't reply to her stateside letters, either, she dismissed it -- after all, Michael was recuperating, receiving therapy. And then, a few months later, the local paper was full of Papa and Mama Satariano taking the train to D.C. to attend the presentation by President Roosevelt of the Congressional Medal of Honor -- the first of the war!

How Patsy Ann wished she could have been there, standing next to Michael in the White House Executive Office as General Eisenhower lowered the looped ribbon with the golden star over his head ...

For several weeks Michael had toured the East Coast, making speeches (she could hardly believe that, shy as he was!) and promoting the sale of war bonds and stamps. Banquets, dinners, receptions, receiving the keys to cities, shaking hands with mayors and governors and senators ... how thrilling it would have been, to be at his side. Michael, though, probably detested all of it ...

Yesterday, in Chicago, Michael had been flown into Municipal Airport and whisked away for a ticker tape parade down packed State Street. The key-to-the-city ceremony had been at City Hall, with Mayor Kelly and various dignitaries lavishing praise on this "heroic native son of Illinois."

Michael gave a speech, his voice soft and uninflected; but even Patsy Ann, listening on the radio, would have to admit the talk was not a memorable one, sounding nothing like Michael: "There are many who speak of giving their all, but are they willing to allocate ten percent of their earnings for war bonds?"

Still, as she curled beside the console, feeling like a schoolgirl, heart beating like a triphammer, she cherished the sound of his voice.

Had she done the right thing, she wondered, not going in to the city? Waiting for today, for what she hoped and prayed would be just the right moment?

Last night, she and her sister had sat in their loose-fitting man-tailored pj's in the upstairs bedroom they still shared (Patsy Ann lived at home and had rebuffed any attempt by sororities to rush her) ...