Sandhogs A Novel

"The New York City underworld in the boomtown 1980s: land values are skyrocketing; new buildings are going up on every block: fortunes are being made overnight - and extorted in the morning." "On the streets of Hell's Kitchen, both the Mafia and the feds are moving in on the construction rackets, for now in Irish hands. In the Irish mob's intensifying power struggle, an internecine war ignites in the back rooms and broad daylight of the neighborhood. At the center of the struggle are the Adare brothers: Paddy, a failed boxer turned mob henchman who never left the streets he grew up on; and Billy, a college graduate briefly working in the tunnels as a sandhog before entering law school to pursue the American dream - brothers divided by everything but their powerful blood tie." "Now, as their paths converge on familiar streets in a crossfire of greed, treachery, and violence, their loyalties - to family, friends, neighborhood, and most important, each other - will be put to a brutal test."--BOOK JACKET.

Thomas Kelly is the author of three novels set in New York City. Born in New York, Kelly spent ten years as a construction worker and sandhog--working in the subway tunnels beneath the city--before attending Fordham University and Harvard, where he received a master’s degree in public administration. Kelly parlayed his experience in union politics into a job as an advance man for the campaign of New York mayor David Dinkins, an experience which would form the basis for some of his fiction.

Kelly began writing in the mid-1990’s, and published his debut, Payback, in 1997. A gritty look at the overlap between construction and the mafia, it was critically acclaimed and adapted to film by David Mamet. Kelly’s other works are The Rackets, Sandhogs, and Empire Rising, a historical novel about the construction of the Empire State Building.