Not really my taste, but I enjoyed it a bit more than the other one of Charyn's novels I've read, Paradise Man.

This one is a savage satirical fantasy (I hope!) about gangsters on New York's East Side. The twist is that the gang consists almost entirely of professional people of the sort we would consider least likely to be running cocaine in derelict buildings: publishers, lawyers, nurses, musicians, KGB officers. Of course it turns out that they all had their lives messed up working for the CIA in Vietnam. The style is vaguely Runyonesque, but the characters are all straight out of Graham Greene, whilst the plot has as many twists as you could desire, and then a few more. By the end it's a fairly safe bet that you won't have any more idea who was really working for whom than the main characters do. ( )