My Ride With Gus

On New Year's Eve, Jimmy Gambar (nee Gambuzza) storms out of Windows on the World restaurant, leaving his uptight girlfriend, her ridiculous gift of a hot pink silk tie, and the diamond blaze of the Brooklyn Bridge behind. At thirty-eight, Jimmy's precise, architect's life plan has just fallen apart, undermined by his would-be fiancee's manic drive to reinvent him. Later that night, trouble hits big...a sleazy downtown bar, a shady lady with a switchblade in his Soho loft, an accidental fall against a metal lamp. Now Jimmy has a dead woman's body to deal with, and only one person to turn to: his brother Gus.Driving across the bridge to Brooklyn with a body rolled up in an oriental carpet locked in the trunk, Jimmy has the feeling that Gus is taking him back to sixteenth-century Sicily. ''Don't tell me what I don't want to know,'' says Gus ''The Ghost'' Gambuzza, whose name is known to every street punk and whose car stays unlocked in his Bay Ridge neighborhood - and untouched, except when kids reverently polish it. But Jimmy has a lot to say, and a painful secret burned deep in his heart that changed his life, and Gus's, forever. Long estranged from his family, Jimmy's on an all-night ride into his past with a brother who, for all he knows, might save or kill him. Jimmy's about to find out once and for all who loves him best.