SOURCE: "Prizzi for President," in The New York Times Book Review, October 9, 1988, p. 24.

In the review below, Patrick praises Condon's characterization in Prizzi's Glory.

The final volume in the Prizzi trilogy, Prizzi's Glory, opens in 1985 with the family doing business as usual in Brooklyn under the skilled stewardship of its 48-year-old C.E.O., Charley Partanna, whom Richard Condon fans know as the Mafioso whose single venture into matrimony, with a hit woman for the mob, ended with her tragic death in California.

At the start of the present volume Charley marries Maerose Prizzi, a great beauty and granddaughter of Don Corrado, bringing to fruition their 19-year engagement. The most Sicilian of the Don's offspring, she paradoxically longs for respectability and acceptance into New York's nouvelle society. To this end, Charley—who runs the Prizzis' street operations and who is "not an originator" but a man who "could...