Will I love Road to Perdition?

You have three choices here. This first iteration was a graphic novel. This was the basis of the 2002 movie of the same name, starring Tom Hanks as the Angel of Death, Michael O’Sullivan Sr.

Then came a novel, strictly based on the movie.

Collins later followed up with an expanded novel in 2016. This is the one that I read and enjoyed. The expanded novel starts out slow, but picks up steam after 100 pages.

It’s great storytelling.

Road to Perdition takes place during the Great Depression. Like my book, it concerns a man who betrays his Chicago Irish-American mob boss and is forced to flee for his life (accompanied by his young son in this case), pursued by a relentless killer sent by his former boss. Superficially, what appealed to me was the Depression-era atmosphere that the author of Road to Perdition created. On a deeper level, it appealed to me as a story of a man in a battle for the soul of his son. The man, an enforcer for his gangland boss, considers his own… show more.

Michael O'Sullivan, a brutal, but honorable, enforcer for a midwestern mob syndicate keeps a strict line between his work and his home life to the point where his children have no idea what he does for a living, only that it's "important." When Michael's twelve-year-old son stows away in his father's car to see what his father's work entails, and witnesses him committing a murder, all hell breaks loose and the pair travel around the country waging a guerilla war against the mob and trying to find a way to save themselves.

This is one of my favorite Max Allan… show more.