Visiting Brooklyn is a contemporary novel set in Washington DC, St. Louis, Missouri, New York City, and the Long Island Hamptons. It involves a disgraced political consultant and lobbyist, Patrick Connor, who escapes to St. Louis to avoid a nationwide scandal he helped create in DC. Right out of today's headlines, the scandal revolves around an outed gay member of congress and a string of bad luck on Patrick's part. While in St. Louis, he meets a Russian doctor, Lilya Ivanova, who is doing post graduate work at Washington University in the area of medical business practices. They begin an affair which lasts for about a month. Patrick Connor must return briefly to New York to confront his estranged heiress wife who now wants a divorce. While he is in New York, his Russian doctor lover is taken from Washington University by members of the Russian Mafia to New York City. Patrick returns to St. Louis and must begin the hunt for his lost love. He contacts people from his past to help in the search. His boyhood friend, Vinny De Pama, is a member of the defunct Italian Mafia in New York City. Patrick has to contact Vinny to help in the search after not talking to him for over thirty years. They share a secret of a violent act they committed as children, which has so far kept them apart but now will help bring them together. Patrick's early life is explained through various flashback chapters that examine his friendships and struggles growing up in Brooklyn in the mid 1950's. Approximately one fourth of the novel involves Patrick's growing years in a fatherless home with a schizophrenic mother. Patrick's life mentor is a secular priest named Peat McKay. Peat has a love for women that causes him trouble, especially when he chooses to be involved with the girlfriend of a Brooklyn mafia prince, who is also Vinny De Pama's mother. The novel's ending involves an unusual take down of the Russian mafia in New York City using characters collected throughout the book. A number of very colorful characters appear throughout the novel. The characters' dialogue and personalities can be compared to an Elmore Leonard novel. Some unique insights into the workings of the New York Russian mafia are also revealed, specially in the areas of insurance and medical fraud, as well as the sex trade. Russian phrases are used throughout with accompanying English translations. Visiting Brooklyn is approximately 450 pages and 191,000 words in length and is written in the third person.
