Lowdown, by Anthony Schneider, follows Jimmy Piccini’s life, told in two different timelines. The novel shows readers his life as a young man: learning the mob business, navigating the loyalties, and falling for Milena, the captivating wife of another made man. When Jimmy is connected with a murder,  and refuses to rat on anyone else, he lands in jail.  In the second timeline, he’s fifty-eight and newly released after 25 years. Now Jimmy must adjust to a very different life, including the death of the woman he loved so much before he was arrested.

Lowdown delivers all the expected Mafia content, with intense loyalties, loads of wealth, and loads of risk, and still includes a moving love story. Jimmy is surprisingly relatable for an ex-con. I was interested in his return from prison to seeing streets and alliances that are familiar, but wildly different from the world he remembers. Readers see Jimmy’s both caring side and his ruthless side. When he hears that the man who helped put him away for 25 years is not hidden away in witness protection, but actually visiting Brooklyn, I didn’t know whether Jimmy would seek revenge or move on, and more intriguingly, I wasn’t sure which way I wanted him to go.

Milena’s story unfolds in its own set of flashbacks, charting her youth and her disastrous marriage to a powerful but abusive mobster.  While Jimmy is in prison, Milena and her husband escape to Italy to escape prosecution, and find that they can’t return home. Of course, a beautiful, remote Sicilian village is a far cry from Jimmy’s years in jail, but in a way, both characters lose years of their lives after the same crime. They each spend years waiting and hoping they can someday return.

Readers can see Milena growing and developing over the years, from her youthful escapades to marrying a made man. I couldn’t help thinking what a great mobster Milena would make, if she were a man. She has the understanding and the ruthlessness to be a criminal mastermind herself, and it’s especially frustrating when she realizes she’s married to someone who isn’t. She’s a good partner to Jimmy, or she would have been, if she were free to date and marry him.  Again, we see this intriguing blend of ruthlessness and compassion, especially as she raises her children almost entirely alone.

Lowdown is definitely a mafia novel, with all the danger, greed, and intense loyalties you’d expect. The author drops names of historical mobsters and trials to ground the story in reality, too. So this book works as a solid crime story, but it’s really a character-driven novel at its heart, following two people over many years.