A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself - Hardcover

An Amazon Best Book of March 2019: A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself is one those books that announces itself as a classic in the making by the way it reads as both familiar and startlingly fresh. Mob widow Rena has clocked an insistent suitor with an ashtray, and believing she’s killed him, stolen his vintage Impala and headed for the Bronx, where her estranged daughter Adrienne lives. That however, is where Adrienne’s boyfriend Richie has just given several mobsters “early retirement,” stolen $500K from them, and is preparing to go on the run with Adrienne and her teenage daughter. It’s a really inconvenient day to try to force a family reunion. After a lifetime of willfully keeping her head in the sand when it comes to her husband’s occupation, Rena has just thrust herself into the center of it, as her flit becomes entangled with Richie’s and both of them pick up unexpected flight companions. In Rena’s case it’s the retired adult movie star who lives next door as well as a granddaughter who may have inherited some of her grandfather’s traits. In Richie’s case it’s a guy who solves problems with a hammer. What develops has been dubbed “screwball noir” and it’s an apt description. But what gives this unexpectedly charming albeit violent tale its heart is the way the women, endangered by the men in their lives, discover that the family you make for yourself may have your back in ways your actual family never will. --Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Book Review

William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. His books include: Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France and shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in the UK; The Lonely Witness, which is nominated for the Hammett Prize; and, most recently, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.