New Crime Thriller Based on Experiences in the 1970s as a Teamster in a Notorious Local
A crime thriller, coming-of-age story and a family saga, THE PRICE YOU PAY is set in the mid-1970s in crumbling Jersey City, where violence and coercion reign. Young Mickey Wright is thrust into a world controlled by a powerful Teamster local. The man who put him in jeopardy: his father, a renegade policeman well-known to Jersey City’s politicians and drug dealers. When a Black trucker is murdered, Mickey must choose between loyalty to his father or to values he shares with Debbie Olsen, the love of his young life who is the daughter of a stable, solidly middle-class family.
The question of whether Mickey can stand tall, break free and live a worthy life of his choosing is answered in a final, shocking confrontation.
In college, Fusilli was a member of Teamsters Local 560 whose president, Anthony Provenzano, a capo in the Genovese crime family, was convicted of racketeering, extortion and murder. Fusilli uses the local’s criminality and the shady political machine as a springboard for his vividly told fiction that’s by turns terrifying and tender.
THE PRICE YOU PAY is Fusilli’s tenth novel, but his first available in print in bookstores as well as via online retailers in 15 years. In the interim, Fusilli published four novels with Thomas & Mercer and with Audible, including NARROWS GATE — “ranked among the half-dozen most memorable novels about the Mob” by Mystery Scene magazine — and its sequel THE MAYOR OF POLK STREET. Well known as the Wall Street Journal’s Rock & Pop Critic, Fusilli is the author of the “Pet Sounds” entry in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series. In 2023, he edited BRUTAL & STRANGE: STORIES INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF ELVIS COSTELLO.
Said author and screenwriter Peter Blauner, “THE PRICE YOU PAY is everything you want crime fiction to be: taut, seriously suspenseful, closely observed, wry, and knowing about the way the real world works.”
Added Meg Gardiner, “With THE PRICE YOU PAY, Fusilli gives us a tough and heartfelt coming of age crime story—gritty, suspenseful, involving. The characters pop and ache and burn.”
THE PRICE YOU PAY is available everywhere books are sold. Visit jimfusilli.com for additional information.
