Roscoe

<b>Thick with crime passion and backroom banter (<i>The New Yorker</i>) <i>Roscoe</i> is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve a deadly comic masterpiece from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <i>Ironweed</i></b> <p/>It's V-J Day the war is over and Roscoe Conway after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine decides to quit politics forever. But there's no way out and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters. <p/>Every step leads back to the past--to the early loss of his true love the takeover of city hall the machine's fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack Legs Diamond. <p/><br><b>William Kennedy's Albany Cycle</b> of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany New York his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century chronicling family life the city's netherworld and its spheres of power--financial ethnic political--often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include <i>Legs</i> <i>Billy Phelan's Greatest Game</i> <i>Ironweed</i> <i>Quinn's Book</i> <i>Very Old Bones</i> <i>The Flaming Corsage</i> and <i>Roscoe</i>.