Welcome to the fabled Gold Coast, that stretch on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America. Here two men are destined for an explosive collision: John Sutter, Wall Street lawyer, holding fast to a fading aristocratic legacy; and Frank Bellarosa, the Mafia don who seizes his piece of the staid and unprepared Gold Coast like a latter-day barbarian chief and draws Sutter and his regally beautiful wife, Susan, into his violent world. Told from Sutter’s sardonic and often hilarious point of view, and laced with sexual passion and suspense, THE GOLD COAST is Nelson DeMille’s captivating story of friendship and seduction, love and betrayal.

My Thoughts

Well, You guys are all probably scratching your heads as to why i’ve read and reviewed this one.  I am too.  To be completely honest, it wasn’t something that i was looking forward to at all!  Let’s go back a few days to Monday night when i was out drinking with my friend, and he some how managed to start debating books with me – like he reads nearly as much as i do.  So, somehow several drinks into it, he’s made me this list of books i HAVE to read, and therefore, yup – this is the first on that list.  His taste is sooooo clearly not mine, but there you go.

So in this first installment to the John Sutter Series, we’re introduced to the man himself, a guy who lives on the ‘Gold Coast’ of Long Island, the north shore, in a place where old money rules, and you have estates with names and not numbers.  his wife of course is the reason for this wealth, her family is OLLLLLLLD money.

Anyhow, it’s through a series of unfortunate events for Mr Sutter, that he ends up in hot water with the IRS, his wife (although she hot watered herself too) and any number of people in the town that life continues to step on him when he’s down.

Through a ‘friendship of sorts that he’s developed with his neighbor, Mr Bellarosa, who happens to be the head of the New York Mafia family, well, you can only imagine how his life is going to get exciting really quick.

The first few hundred pages are blah in my opinion, but that’s mostly because it’s not my style.  In my eyes, it only really gets interesting when Frank is arrested, and we get to see John sort of do his best to get him out on Bail, and then see what happens from there.  There was the air of ‘no fear’ that Bellarosa had, that he was untouchable because that was the way of things, and John had this perpetual fear of everything, so it balanced the pair out.

There are a lot of deaths as excepted in this mafia thriller, but also a lot of heartache and some interesting friendships forged along the way.  I can’t honestly say that i have any interest in continuing the series, but i think that i’ll be coerced along the way at some point.

On that note – happy saturday all!