This is a flip book with two novels: A Place In The Dark braids
history, fiction and politics. It is set in Utica with substantial
passages of painful, site-specific memories of the characters of both
the Vietnam war and the American engagement in Iraq. These memories are
carried by a Vietnamese immigrant woman living in Utica, who suffered in
Saigon, an American Marine and Italian-American Utican who committed an
atrocity during the siege of Khe Sanh, and an Iraqi who administered
torture and worked as translator and interpreter in Baghdad on America's
behalf. The central character is an ex-private investigator, of Utica,
who is an Italian-American, beset by his long-standing guilt for his
deferment from the draft during the Vietnam era and now suffering from
serious heart disease. The Glamour of Evil deals with how, some males,
especially literary/intellectual types, are drawn to violent men in
organized crime. How they secretly desire intimacy with such people whom
they find charismatic, powerful and uniquely free inside a world where
the freedom of the individual is in much doubt. The novel features a
legendary American Mafioso--who loved modern fiction and French
existentialism--Crazy Joey Gallo and his dark world. This is combined
with a whodunit involving Eliot Conte's daughter, a crisis that a
connected man of literary flair promises to resolve for Conte--for an
unusual price.