Bella Mafia by Lynda La Plante

I picked this book up because I needed something not too complicated to get me out of my reading slump. I am not wild about Bella Mafia, but it did do the trick: I’m reading again. Not as much as I’d like to, but that’s okay for now.

Lynda La Plante is a well-known script-writer, among others for Prime Suspect, the police series with Helen Mirren, which I loved very much at the time. Until I came across the omnibus of which Bella Mafia is a part, I didn’t realize she was also an author of thriller/suspense books.

Bella Mafia consists of two very different, but connected parts. The book opens in the present (that being the late 1980s) when Sicilian mafia boss Don Roberto Luciano offers to testify in court for the prosecution in a big mafia case, a step which will put his own life and that of his family in danger. From there on the story goes back in time some fifty years and tells the story of Luciano and his family members, his wife Graziella and their four sons, and how he builds up his empire. When we arrive back in the present, Luciano and his three sons (number four died – an event that is key to the story), a nephew and two grand-children are brutally murdered. Don’t worry, this is not giving away much, it is mentioned on the back-cover of the book. The second part of the book centers around the story of the five Luciano widows taking on the mafia to get back their rightful inheritance.

My main problem with Bella Mafia is that it is supposed to be a thriller (I think), but the first half is more like a family saga of an Italian mafia family and only the second half is thriller or suspense-like. In the end it doesn’t succeed in either. For a family-saga it is too much plot-driven and there’s not enough character development, and for a thriller-type of book it is too long (at 900+ pages it could have done with at least 200 less in my opinion) and there is too much non-thriller stuff going on. I preferred the first part, the family history, but then, as you may have noticed, I tend to enjoy family sagas spanning multiple generations.

Like any thriller, the story is plot-driven, more than character-driven, but in this case I think that the story could have done with more character development and might have worked better if it were more of a psychological thriller. As it is now, I felt very distant from the characters and especially in the second part that took away the suspense. The fact that the  reader knows from the beginning of the second part what’s going on and that the reader knows more than the five women (sorry I am so vague about the second part of the book, to tell you more would be giving away too much) wasn’t used nearly enough to get into the minds of the characters. They stayed too distant to become really believable to me.

Bella Mafia is a fun summer read, I definitely did enjoy it on a certain level, but it ultimately left me unsatisfied.