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Jay Tasti and Albert Nikozak grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a tough little section of Long Island called Duck Alley. Most of the time the sounds of garbage cans clattering and railroad cars rumbling by were drowned out by their teary-eyed laughter. Days were filled with baseball, dreams, and absurd jokes. Their friendship held steadily into adulthood, even as Jay became a schoolteacher and Albert chose to live life as a pimp and successful fence with tentative ties to organized crime. But when the decomposed body of a teenage girl is found half washed out of the earth in upstate New York, their lifelong friendship begins to unravel. Set into motion is a series of events that will test the two friends' commitment to each other, to themselves, and most of all to their sense of honor. An ambitious and vindictive DA, an abusive and alcoholic father, a loving but isolated wife all play their parts as Jay and Albert meet in bars and basic training, on train tracks and in hunting shacks, graveyards, and prisons. Their fate-driven story ends with a return to the boyhood sands of Jones Beach, where Jay attains a measure of redemption by discovering a new way of looking back at those Duck Alley days of their youth.
Jim DeFilippi left Duck Alley to serve in the U.S. Air Force from 1969 to 1973. He has been writing and teaching school for twenty-five years in northern Vermont, where he and his wife raised their two children. DUCK ALLEY is his second novel.
Price: $24.00
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