T. M. Goeglein. Cold Fury. New York: Putnam, 2012. Print.

This Young Adult (YA) novel has a picture of a girl on the cover. But Cold Fury is not chick lit. The main character happens to be a girl, but from my informal survey of those who have read it, the guys like it more.

Sara Jane Rispoli at the age of sixteen discovers that her family has been at the top of the Chicago mob for three generations. She learns this when her house is broken into while she is out and her family—father, mother, and younger brother—disappears.

This disappearance apparently has something to do with a power play within the Outfit (as they call the mob in Chicago), and because she is now the heiress apparent to the Rispoli position, she finds herself in danger. She has to stay on the run, and she also has to fight back. Unlike most girls, she has learned to box. One of the other main characters is her trusted mentor Willy Williams, owner of a Chicago boxing club. Mystery. Action. And, I should mention, some cool cars.

As a teenager, Sara Jane does use her newfound mob connections to take care of a high school bully. She also learns about throwaway cell phones and safe houses. But most of all, she and the reader learn about the ins and outs of the Outfit. Her father and grandfather achieved their reputation and status by resolving conflicts between different factions and families within the Outfit. Now they turn to Sara Jane for some of the same counsel.

One minor narrative thread reminds of one used by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities. Sara Jane is reminiscing about her nanny who died when she was nine. The nanny used to talk about her brother “poor Kevin” who disappeared. In A Tale of Two Cities, the Manette’s housekeeper Miss Pross speaks very highly of her long lost brother Solomon. Near the end of the story we discover who Solomon Pross is and that he has actually played a part in the story on several occasions, though no one realizes it at the time. So we discover “poor Kevin” has not disappeared after all.

One passage was self-consciously making fun of popular YA series. I had to laugh, but at the very end the same thing gave me a little concern:

I roll my eye at books, TV, and movies that depict people my age stuck in some moody teenage dilemma. If they’re rich kids, they’re moody rich kids, if they’re vampire kids, they’re moody vampire kids, if they’re postapocalyptic kids…you get the picture.

Yeah, we get the picture: We know about the Gossip Girls, the Twilight series, and the Hunger Games stories. Sara Jane’s story, she seems to promise, was going to be about more or less ordinary people. Nothing elitist, nothing supernatural, nothing sci-fi. Yet the sample chapter of Cold Fury 2 at the end of this book sounds like a Godfather-zombie mashup. Say it ain’t so Mr. Goeglein…

Anyway, the first two pages of Cold Fury draw the reader in, and the story keeps on rolling. But like the Harry Potter or Gallagher Girls series, to get a real resolution, you have more books to read.