What a wild, wild story that has been told often with many characters. Every road leads somewhere and if your insides are not changed the outsides will not matter. A 50 year saga of live, love, and opportunity lost. Great read for me

This is the story of Rocco Anthony Balliro, a man who makes his living as a criminal, earning his money by breaking the law. Then he meets a beautiful woman named Toby and is instantly smitten with her, though she happens to be married with two children. But her husband is in jail a lot and doesn’t help her at all. Before long Rocco and Toby are living together, and Rocco begins to think of getting a job and going straight for this woman so that they can have a real life and a real family. He doesn’t want to keep risking being separated from her by going back to prison. Especially after a close call he has nearly getting caught by the police one night.

When Toby’s husband gets out of jail, they know she has to see him and get things straight about a divorce. She plans to only be gone a short while and when it takes much longer, Rocco goes looking for her, thinking she’s in trouble and needs help. When he goes to the apartment house to rescue Toby with his brother and a friend to help him, they end up in an unexpected ambush shootout and they hightail it out of there after returning fire. As they turn and run, they hear more gunfire coming from inside the apartment, which puzzles him. After a couple of days, and learning that his beloved Toby and her son Mark were both killed in that apartment and that it was police in there shooting, not the husband and his cohorts, Rocco turns himself in to police. He knows he hasn’t killed anyone and wants to clear his name. Police are trying to charge him with murder. The murder of Toby and little Mark. It results in nearly 50 years of incarceration, and escapes, 2 marriages, and Rocco doggedly working to clear his name.

Such a haunting tale of ruined lives and lost love that left me saddened by it all. I try not to read anything about the book beforehand, coming to it clean. I was so shocked when Toby and Mark were killed that I kept thinking, maybe hoping it was a police trick, and that it wasn’t really true. I finally had to accept that it was true, as much as I hated it. I can only imagine how Rocco felt. And being accused of killing them and serving all those years for it, can there be anything worse? What a story. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by #netgalley, author Daniel Zimmerman, and the publisher for my fair review.

WildBlue Press
Pub: Sept. 25th 2018