David Denby recommends him in 03/2012 New Yorker

Hard Case Crime has hit another home run. Casino Moon by Peter Blauner is Blauner's second novel, originally published in 1994 and now re-published by Hard Case Crime. Blauner has written six or seven novels and has written and produced for the Law and Order television series.

This is a story about Anthony Russo, born into the mob. His father, Michael, was killed early in Anthony's life and his father's closest friend, Vin, has been his surrogate father for much of his life in Atlantic City. Vin is the right hand man of the fat greedy local mob boss and he wants to see Anthony become a "made man." Although Anthony is not one hundred percent Sicilian, Vin is hoping that an exception can be made. Anthony doesn't want to be involved in the mob. He doesn't want to take orders, pick up envelopes, or knock off enemies. Vin is so convinced Anthony will succeed in the family business, he never stops talking him up even when the boss is convinced Anthony can't pull the trigger.

Of course, marrying the mob boss's niece didn't help any. Nor did borrowing $60,000 from the boss to provide for his family. Anthony can't pay him back and can't lift his family out of poverty by making a legitimate living. And, his wife is unhappy and bitter about it. She married him because she thought he was a good guy, not because she took a vow of poverty.

Anthony stumbles on a scheme by which he can pay back what he owes and get a grubstake up to start a respectable life. His friend has a brother who was a former middleweight champ a decade earlier, but is now a washed-up has-been who barely survives a sparring match in the local gym. Anthony is going to get Elijah on the headline bill at the local casino and reap twenty percent of the take. He thinks he is going to make an honest living and escape the criminal life.

Along the way, he meets a gal who works as a bikini wrestler in a bar, a step up from working the street corners for her. The boss warns him that if he steps out on the boss's niece, he'll find himself missing quite a few body parts.

Anthony's got the mob after him, his crazy wife after him, the police who think he offed a couple of local hoods, and, to make matters worse, he's in debt up to his eyeballs to the local loan shark to finance his boxer, the nearly-geriatric punching bag.

The story is well-written and, despite its 300-page length, can be read in an evening. Blauner has the street language down and you feel Anthony's frustration as he is trapped in a maze he can't get out of. It is not simply a bang-bang shoot-em-up story either, but a great character study of Anthony. Highly recommended crime fiction reading. Thumbs up.
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"Casino Moon" is the tale of a son of the mob trying to make it on his own. Anthony Russo struggles to wiggle out from under the thumb of his adoptive father and the local Atlantic City mob boss, but in doing so he only reinforces the fact that he isn't much different than the thugs he despises. After failing in the construction business, he tries his hand at becoming a boxing promoter for an aging prize fighter. In the process he begins an affair with a cocktail waitress (despite having a wife, two kids, and a third on the way) and proceeds to make a mess out of everything he touches.

"Casino Moon" is part familial drama, part crime story. There's no black and white, just a lot of gray. And while the characters were--for the most part--well rounded and realistic, for some reason the narrative just didn't satisfy. To be sure there were some bright spots. Blauner has a real knack for imagery, dialogue and characterization. But the story didn't engage me. I was waiting for Russo to hurry up and die already (because, given the course of the novel, that was the only outcome that made any sense stylistically. I won't tell you whether I was right or not--wouldn't want to ruin the surprise and all.). This book is a good example of someone who's got good execution, but a lackluster story. If Blauner had a more engaging plot to go along with it, it would have been a better book.

And stylistically, I do have one gripe. The narrative switched point of view and voice too much for my taste. When you simply switch the character POV and retain the 3rd person voice, that's usually fine. But Blauner switched point of view AND voice. The scenes told from Russo's POV are in 1st person, while every other POV is in 3rd person. It was jarring to read, broke up the continuity of the narrative, and was by all rights unnecessary for the telling of the story.

Overall, it was an OK book. I read it because it was part of the Hard Case Crime series, but otherwise it probably wouldn't have caught my attention. Technically Blauner has all the tools necessary to write a great novel. He just needs a better plot to use them on. ( )

Casino Moon is Peter Blauner's second published novel, a follow-up to his 1992 Edgar Award-winning debut Slow Motion Riot, and has been republished by Hard Case Crime; while it's a better novel than Slow Motion Riot, it's still a social problem novel in a desultory thriller disguise.

Anthony Russo is the stepson of the lieutenant of the gluttonous boss of a seedy, down-at-the-heels mob in Atlantic City, Teddy Marino; Anthony can never hope to become a made man in Teddy's family (an offshoot of the once-powerful but, over the last several years, almost comically inept but nonetheless horrifically violent Philadelphia mob family), despite his stepfather Vin's impassioned pleas, due to being only half-Sicilian. (Anthony is troubled by the suspicion that both Vin and Teddy might know more than they're letting on about the disappearance of his biological father, Mike Dillon, when he was a boy.) Anthony manages to duck Vin's "gift" of an assignment to kill the father of a wiseguy-wannabe who has been skimming the family's extortion proceeds, but, for all of his maneuvering and struggling -- he has a faltering construction business that he started with a loan from his "Uncle" Teddy (Anthony is married to Teddy's niece) but refuses to avail himself of Teddy's insider connections to land lucrative contracts -- he finds himself steadily sucked back into the family's orbit, until he hits upon the idea of becoming a boxing promoter by backing the comeback of a has-been 43-year-old fighter named Elijah Barton, and thereby sidling into the moneyed world of Atlantic City's casinos, which Teddy was too crude and too dull to figure out how to infiltrate. (This is one of the reasons why his mob is from hunger; of course, it doesn't help that he's cursed with hilariously feckless soldiers.) The problem is, Anthony is so broke, he has to get himself even deeper in debt to Teddy via one of his loan sharks, in the hope that Elijah can win the purse so he can repay Teddy before Teddy realizes that his despised nephew-in-law has stumbled into a gold mine...

Casino Moon can't help but recall Gerald Kersh's Night and the City in its basic plot; if Blauner sticks to a more straightforward story than Kersh, with his uncontrolled polemic, could, it still feels a bit too pat and uninspired to rise above the level of a decent time-killer. Blauner, as in Slow Motion Riot, opts for a shifting point of view: Anthony gets to be a first person narrator, but the POV shifts between a handful of other characters (including a corrupt Atlantic City police detective named Pete "Pig Fucker" Farley), all told in tight third person omniscient; this strategy sells Blauner's social outlook more effectively than a straight-up first person POV would've, but it also keeps the reader more detached from the proceedings than he otherwise might've been. Blauner manages some felicitous phrases (a sunset is described, on the first page, as showing "[a] little stretch of pink...under the dark skirt of the night") as well as some nice comedic effects (the new NYC mob boss, Jackie "J.J." Pugnitore, has his prejudices filliped by the narrator's observation that "[h]e would've been disturbed to know that his ancestors in Sicily were referred to as 'those Africans' by their neighbors on the Italian mainland" [p. 73], while Teddy whines to Vin about the need to restore "law and order" after one of their card games is jacked [p. 112]; this latter bit is reminiscent of John Polito's Johnny Caspar's disquisition on ethics in the opening of the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing), but one can't help but think that, as with Slow Motion Riot, he put far more effort into padding out his roster of blurbers (the omnipresent Stephen King, but also James Patterson, the notoriously cantankerous James Ellroy and Patricia Highsmith are quoted in the Hard Case Crime edition) than in fashioning a novel that will actually catch fire. ( )

Blauner's reach exceeds his grasp, which is a bit of a shame, because this could have been a much better book. Instead, while some scenes are quite effective and will stick with you, the whole story doesn't hold together that well and is a bit of rambling mess. At 333 pages, it's about a hundred pages too long. It suffers from changing viewpoints - part a first-person story by the less-than-sympathetic protagonist, who I hope Blauner wasn't intending as some sort of tragic hero. Then there are a lot of third-person passages as well, of varying quality. The story would have been much more effective and intense had Blauner stuck to the one voice.

Seemingly major things happen or major characters appear and it's like the author has no idea what to do with them. A couple of times there are crucial events about to take place, and he just skips to afterwards as if he is too lazy or doesn't have the skill to write about them. I have no idea why the PF (I won't say what it stands for, but it's in general keeping with the vulgarities strewn throughout the book) character, a less than admirable police detective, is in the book at all. In the early passages, it looks like he has some important part to play in the story, but when he helps arrest a colleague of the protagonist who could bring the whole plot crashing to the ground, nothing ever really happens! But it has to be that way if the rest of the story is to go on. Sloppy sloppy sloppy.

The Atlantic City backgrounds are fairly interesting - though thinly drawn.

I'm giving it 2 1/2 stars, because you will definitely stick around to see what happens at the end. But Blauner should have found a better editor for this one. It was never on track to be another Godfather - Puzo was a hack, but he was a hell of a storyteller, and knew where he wanted the story to go. ( )