THE FAMILY HIGHTOWER

In 1968, in two remote corners of the globe, two cousins are born to the same name, the name of their grandfather, a paterfamilias of legendary accomplishments: Peter Henry Hightower, a self-made man, sometime criminal, of immigrant stock and a proud son of Cleveland, Ohio. One Peter is raised on a murky, peripatetic bounce through the Third World and turns out to be a first-class journalist and compassionate cosmopolite based in Granada, Spain. The other Peter, who goes by Petey, ends up a wealthy drug-addled minor criminal, first in Cleveland and then in Kiev, Ukraine.

In 1995, Petey runs afoul of his criminal associates in Kiev and disappears. The criminals track down the wrong cousin, and Peter in Granada finds himself on the run without any sense of why. He runs from one family member to the next, piecing together what his cousin was involved in as well as his family's long and complicated relationship with organized crime. Along the way we move backward and forward in time, from the original Peter Henry Hightower's story to that of his children, how Peter and Petey have been living in their grandfather's shadow all along, and how they might escape.

The novel takes a close look at capitalism and organized crime in the 20th century, and how increasingly, the former is starting to look a lot like the latter. It's about the legend of the self-made man, the lies a family tells itself to stay together, the bonds of love and longing that only a family can make and that outlast all odds, and what money (lots and lots of money) can do - and cannot do.

Brian Francis Slattery is the author of three previous novels, most recently Lost Everything, which won the Philip K. Dick Award in 2012, Slattery is a musician with a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University. He is an editor and co-founder of the New Haven Review, and co-hosts Paper Trails, a show on WNPR about books.