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In Evening's Empire, Zachary Lazar, whose novel Sway was named one of the Best Books of 2008 by Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, and other publications, brilliantly attempts to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to his father's murder.
How did Ed Lazar, a fun-loving but meticulous accountant, become involved in a multi-million dollar real-estate scandal involving politicians and Mafia figures? How much did he know about his colleagues' illegal activities? Why had he chosen to testify against his former business partner, Ned Warren, Sr.? Warren was "a mystery man," according to 60 Minutes, widely known as "the Godfather of land fraud."
The day before Ed Lazar was scheduled to appear in front of a grand jury he was killed in a "gangland-style murder," as reported by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Four hundred mourners attended a memorial service for him the next day. Evening's Empire is based on archival research and interviews — introducing a cast of characters as various as Senator Barry Goldwater and Cesar Romero — and is clarified by scenes imagined in the context of this evidence. It is a singular and haunting story of American ambition and its tragic cost.
Of Zachary Lazar's previous book, Sway, the reviewer for The New York Times Book Review wrote, "This brilliant novel is about what's to be found in the shadows." The same can be said of Evening's Empire's true story, but here the shadows are very close to home.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 8, 2009 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
- ISBN: 9780316153324
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780316072250
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780316072250
- File size: 2592 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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October 1, 2009
An exacting examination of the life and 1975 murder of the author's father, Ed Lazar, an Arizona accountant killed just before testifying about the house-of-cards real-estate business he'd inadvertently helped orchestrate.
When novelist Lazar (Sway, 2006, etc.) was six, his father was shot five times in the stairwell of a parking garage, assassinated by Mafia hit men."Several different profiles have emerged of Lazar—a'sheep,' an aggressor, a devoted husband, a swinger," a local journalist wrote at the time,"but no one seems sure which description fits the best." For the next two decades, Ed Lazar was depicted as a con artist—the equivalent, in his son's mind, of his being murdered twice. After it was revealed, in 1996, that the murder had been ordered by Lazar's former business partner, Ned Warren Sr., the author undertook the process of reviewing the preceding events and shady dealings, drafting a portrait of a father he never really knew."Whatever I write," Lazar warns readers,"will have to be a kind of conjuration." His book untangles how his father came to work as the bookkeeper for Warren, the"king of Arizona land fraud." By reselling deeds for the same quarter-acre lots of an undeveloped subdivision, Warren, along with his partners, including the bribed state's real-estate commissioner, swindled millions of dollars from thousands of investors. The cast of real-life characters is fascinating, but numerous enough to tax distractible readers. Instead of following a linear plot, the author—who, by his own account, lacks objectivity ("I knew I was not an objective judge. My emotions were carrying me from one conjecture to another")—frequently switches time frames and interweaves real transcripts with imagined scenes. Fueled by an appealing masculine energy, the book is timely, considering the current real-estate climate, but it falls short of the great true-crime titles, handicapped by too many threads and a knotty structure that never pays off.
Meticulous but difficult to follow.(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
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