Shamrock Alley is a thriller written by Ronald Malfi based on the real life story of his father, who was a Secret Service agent, represented in this novel as John Mavio, who brought down some nasty gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen. Mavio and his partner Bill Kirsch are investigating a counterfeit money ring which leads them to Mickey O’Shay and Jimmy Kahn, two brutal young gangsters who employ violence as currency. O’Shay and Khan rule Hell’s Kitchen with intimidation. Khan is an intelligent businessman, while O’Shay is an absolute nut. Together they make a formidable team that Mavio is determined to bring down, regardless of the cost.
To say that Shamrock Alley is well written and entertaining hardly tells the story. Malfi’s tightly written prose and well constructed plot become obvious right from the beginning. But what stands out most is the way the characters come off the page and become alive. Perhaps it was because Malfi was so close to the subject matter, but Malfi has created one of the grittiest and most realistic pieces of fiction I have ever read. The dialogue, the emotion, the intensity, the action come together seamlessly. If Shamrock Alley was a movie, and I think it should be, it would be the type of movie that makes you stay on the edge of your seat.
As the novel progresses, John Mavio starts to spiral into an abyss. His desire to take down Khan and O’Shay become an obsession. He dives deeply into the underworld to get close to O’Shay. You can almost feel his sanity begin to unravel. The danger becomes very real as the gangsters invade his apartment and he has to get his pregnant wife out of imminent danger. The climax is both dramatically intense and satisfying. Simply put, Shamrock Alley is one of the best crime thrillers I have ever read, and I have read many.

Carl Alves - author of Two For Eternity ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Regular readers will of course already be familiar with alt-horror author Ron Malfi; after all, I've reviewed two of his novels here in the past, 2007's atmospheric Via Dolorosa and 2008's even more atmospheric Passenger, two books that share with each other a quiet, unhurried sense of dread, and which owe as much to Southern Gothic as they do David Lynch. But it turns out that Malfi has gone in a whole different direction for his latest, Shamrock Alley, deciding to write a fictionalized account of what turns out to be a true story, concerning his real-life father's undercover bust of a notorious Irish gang in New York, back when he worked for the Secret Service; and that ends up making the book a straight-ahead crime tale, which then makes it problematic for me to review, in that I don't particularly care for crime fiction and thus only read one or two books a year in the genre, making it difficult for me to judge the difference between an only so-so crime book and a better-than-average one.

So instead today I'm giving the book a thoroughly middle-of-the-road score; because on the one hand, it at least seems to contain all the tropes I assume a typical crime fan is looking for in this genre -- the scrappy detective, the almost nonexistent loving wife, the world-weary partner, the crabby by-the-book boss, the utterly psychotic gangster villains, the single-mother hooker informant with a heart of gold -- but on the other hand, I at least didn't see anything in this manuscript to elevate it above the typical genre thriller, the kind of utterly stereotypical book that makes up the vast majority of titles published in any given genre, no matter what that genre is. And as I've said many times before, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but does mean that it's destined to be enjoyed only by existing fans of crime fiction, and enjoyed only in a comfort-food kind of way. That doesn't make the book terrible, but neither does it make it great, which is why Shamrock Alley is getting the score it is today.

Out of 10: 7.5 ( )

Shamrock Alley is a fictional cop thriller based on the true story of an undercover Secret Service agent who infiltrated an Irish gang in Hell's Kitchen in the 1980s. The agent was the author's father.

John Mavio and his partner lose the trail of a counterfeiting case until an informant connects John with Mickey O' Shay and Jimmy Khan. At first the two appear to be street punks, but as John goes deeper undercover, he realizes the two have managed to gain control of organized crime in Hell's Kitchen through sheer brutality and terror. John becomes obsessed with sending both Mickey and Jimmy to prison for a very long time, but Jimmy remains elusive and lets Mickey, who is a psychopath, deal with John. John becomes desperate for an arrest and Jimmy begins to question who John is.

This is a decent cop thriller. It starts with an action scene in the basement of a bar, but once John and his partner lose their leads, the book slows down until John starts dealing with Mickey on a regular basis. The characters are well-written and the book is hard to put down once you get past the halfway mark. ( )