Paradise salvage - John Fusco

Twelve-year-old Nunzio's innocence is lost forever in the summer of 1979. When he opens the boot of a wrecked Pontiac Bonneville in his father's junkyard, his vivid imagination meets a story it couldn't invent. But who will believe he's found a dead body when all the evidence is lost to the Paradise Salvage crusher?
In his large, loud Italian-American family, only his brother, De Niro-obsessive Danny Boy, and his father's estranged cousin, quadriplegic ex-cop Angelo, are persuaded. Together with Angelo's trained monkey, they start a search through the darkest, strangest secrets of their small community, and to the core of their own family's loyalty.
A gripping mystery, PARADISE SALVAGE is also a wonderfully colourful portrait of a boy's coming-of-age in an Italian-American community. Award-winning screenwriter John Fusco's first novel is a gripping elegy for an age when the evil eye was as real as the local hard men.