3Easy Money & Other Stories is a collection straddling the line between literary and crime fiction. Life can be that way. When you live on the south shore of Long Island a few miles east of Queens, mobsters aren't just characters you see in the movies, sometimes they turn out to be friends of friends, your neighbors, guys who drink in the same bar as you.

Welcome to the borderland where the outskirts of New York City overlap with the Long Island suburbs. Meet Tiny the giant, Muscles, Scooter, Potatoes, Babydoll, and Thunder Zymborowski, formerly known as Big Hoss the Jersey Strangler. If you live here, you may come to realize that crime -- organized crime, semi-organized crime, and horribly unorganized crime -- is taking place all around you.

In these darkly funny tales, men and women face the consequences of their terrible decisions. People living too close to the edge wander still closer and fall off

into darkness. But there's also the sweetness of family, friendship, camaraderie, first love, and teenage heartache to lighten the mood. Absurd, raunchy, grotesque, subversive, vulgar, and violent -- these stories are also often hilarious and oddly touching.