Excerpt from The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Geraci wanted to give every live man there a bear hug and a highball, but he settled for striding toward them, raising his pistol before they could raise theirs. Being the cowardly cocksuckers that at heart they surely were, they hit the ground, which gave him a clear shot through the doorway to the office at his target: the rectangle of hazy blue light behind them. Geraci fired. The shock he felt at the recoil (was Neri really stupid enough to give him a gun with more than one bullet? what a dumbass!) giving way a split second later to a dull pop, a puff of toxic smoke, a belched little fireball, and a tiny and satisfying afterglow of falling glass. Human beings have never built a machine more satisfying to destroy than a television set.

And then silence.

For Geraci, it seemed like an awfully long silence.

"Hey!" shouted a raspy-voiced man, one of Geraci's guys. "I was watching that."

It cracked everyone up. Just what the doctor ordered. Neri patted Geraci softly on the back. Geraci handed him the gun. Then everyone went to work.

Clemenza's men used a bone saw on the two corpses who'd been assigned to kill Michael Corleone. Geraci sat on the case of oil cans and watched, so flooded with ebbing adrenaline that everything seemed like the same thing. Grimy window. Calendar with topless wrench-wielding dairy maid. Fan belts on metal hook. Friend's corpse. Button on cuff. A universe of undifferentiated equivalency.

When the men finished, Neri handed Geraci the bone saw and pointed to Tessio's head. Around the gaping entry wound, the dead man's flesh was already proud.

Numb, Geraci took the saw and dropped to one knee. Later, he would look back on this moment with fury. But at the time, Geraci could have been checking the pH in his pool. When a man sees things for their essential literalness, how is sawing off the head of a dead father figure so different from separating a succulent turkey leg from the carcass? A thicker bone, true, but a bone saw is a better tool than some knife your brotherin- law got you as a wedding present.

Nick Geraci closed Tessio's bulging eyes and drew back the saw. Later had come–sooner rather than later, which in a moment of clarity Geraci recognized as later's way.

Neri clamped his hand on Geraci's forearm and took the saw.

"That was an order, too."

"What was an order?" Geraci said.

"Seeing how willing you were to do it."

Geraci knew better than to ask how willing he'd seemed or, worse, who'd given the order. He merely stood and said nothing, went blank and revealed nothing. He motioned toward the pocket of his bloodied suit jacket. Neri nodded. Geraci took out the cigar Clemenza had given him, a Cuban the color of dark chocolate, and sat back down on the oil cans to enjoy it.

Clemenza's men stripped the assassins naked and stuffed their clothing and the ten severed body parts into a suitcase. Tessio's corpse was left alone.

Which was when Geraci figured everything out.

There was no need to send a message to the Barzinis. Everyone involved with Tessio's betrayal was already too dead to benefit from messages. And of course the Corleones wanted Tessio's body found. This part of Brooklyn was identified with the Barzinis. The cops would presume that was who ordered the hit. The detectives would puzzle over the unidentifiable corpses of the assassins, and none of the conclusions they'd draw would involve the Corleones. The Corleones wouldn't even need to trouble their judges or their people in the NYPD. And it wouldn't take the usual forgiven gambling tabs and extended grace periods on loans to get the newspapers to fall in line. They'd play this just the way Michael Corleone wanted and feel virtuous about every squalid inch of type.

It was, Geraci had to admit, brilliant.

Excerpted from The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner Copyright © 2004 by Mark Winegardner. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.