This novel is the double dose Men’s Adventure Fiction DLC we wanted and damn it, just didn’t get.
Spoiler alert – I’m a gamer. Old school, new school, whatever – the way to this woman’s heart is a motherfucking Playstation or a gaming PC. Back in the day, I think around 2000, I got hip to Mafia. Had a copy of it from Circuit City for PC and played the hell out of it. That’s right around the time I was playing Gangster 2, another kick ass game. In fact, I’ve loved the franchise so much I’ve played the Mafia Trilogy over twenty years of my life – do you know how fucking fantastic the story must be for that type of replay value? Trust me, it ain’t easy. Those crazy 2KCzech devs might not speak English but they know American rage and pain, I’ll tell you that!
Fast forward to 2025. There have been four Mafia Games, 5 DLCS, and a complete remaster of the first three games called “The Definitive Edition”. The continuing saga of gangsters in this one crime family featuring interconnecting characters just keeps giving, for better or worse (looking at you Mafia: The Old Country).
The standout, story wise (not gameplay), was Mafia III.
For those that haven’t played any of the Mafia Trilogy, let me give you the tea so I can give you the novel review. Lincoln Clay is a black motherfucker with a chip on his shoulder. That’s not really his fault. His mama was a terrible black whore that died from bad tricks and his daddy was Joe from Mafia II, the ultimate brute asshole that makes you fantasize about popping his fucking shins out the good old fashioned way. All this shit went down from Joe being a bitch and going on the run after the events of Mafia II, when old ass Leo Galante broke him and Vito Scaletta’s partnership up. Joe’s Adventures DLC, while a snoozefest, clears that part up.
Clay grows up in New Bordeaux (a fictional New Orleans), as a stereotypical southern black niglet, casted to being a ward of the state with no mother and no idea who his father is. Nigger shit leads him to as a kid to Sammy Robinson, a slick black creole gangster who ran their home Delray Hollow, which is about as close to living in a southern sewer as you can get. Sammy was an original gangster, making his way up with mob boss Sal Marcano. A lot of folks like the Haitians thought he was a sellout but he had his good moments. He raised Lincoln up alongside his own son, Ellis. Gave him a home filled with chitterlings and corn liquor in exchange for muscling whores and loan shark borrowers for money. At least Lincoln got a trade out of the deal and a complicated father that made him feel he belonged as long as he did his dirty work.
Growing up in that kind of shit left quite the impression on Lincoln. In an act of suicide or as Sammy says, “making his mark on the world” Lincoln enters the military when he gets of age. Of course, Vietnam is going on, so lack of education and a father figure that wanted something more of his son than being targets for the Dixie Mafia earned Lincoln a one way ticket in country to get his ass shot off for a government that still let segregated ranks rule the military roost.
Mafia III: Plains of Jars has now entered the chat.
This book starts Clay off as a buck Private learning about the casualties of war in Vietnam and the cost he must pay as a soldier of forced fortune. He’s having the time of his life cosplaying Deer hunter out there. The who what when where why and how of his time coming into the Special Forces that is talked about in the video game is discussed in depth; Lincoln’s a natural at kicking ass, taking name, cracking open a skull or two, and making pearl necklaces out of intestines. That’s when his trouble starts. Around age 19 he meets John Donovan, who has a penchant for talent he can use to further his private agenda of patriotism and recruits Lincoln into the SFG Green Berets to eat bullets, shit lead, and be the fall guy if something goes tits up.
The problem is, Lincoln is bright eyed and bushy tailed and doesn’t know it.
Let’s talk about Donovan first. This dude is a nutjob CIA rogue head case from the word go and why mental health is important in the war veteran community. This guy has been in service for the military for far too long, like he’s the grandfather of MAGA. Now if you got over how redundant the missions were in Mafia III and played the DLC, you would know that Stones Unturned is the backstory of John Donovan’s white privilege quest of personal virtue signaling to take down the anti-American agents within the CIA ranks he thinks isn’t patriotic. I mean this guy is worse than Rudy Guiliani asking for election returns. Under Donovan’s thumb Clay is thrown into an entirely new war front he doesn’t know shit about, filled with corruption and compromised interests that jizzes into the rich storytelling of Donovan’s motivations in Stones Unturned and Mafia III that Plains of Jars is the origin story for.
Lincoln falls into is a sea of solider corruption that makes the shit Sammy did for a living look like preschool. Donovan gets him into some shit neither of them can get out of, not intentionally of course, but Donovan smells betrayal and wants to get to the bottom of it. That’s when shit gets off the rails, because nobody knows who is behind the sabotages. By the time they both put two and two together, Donovan pretty much leaves Lincoln on a limb, because he’s too busy trying to save his own ass out in the jungle before they both get killed. Both of their heads are on a swivel not for an enemy waiting to smoke their asses but for the devils they know that are lurking to make them a cuckold sandwich. Lincoln though, who always found love evasive, does manage to fall in love with a little honey dip in a captain save a hoe moment. That little bit of ass he gets is just as fleeting as his thing with Roxy in the DLC Faster, Baby, but provokes him into a Samuel L. Jackson attitude similar to what he did in the DLC Sign Of The Times with the Blessed when the little love he gets slips through his fingers and is stolen from him.
This novel is the novel that will make you understand Lincoln a bit better, especially all that shit Vietnam took him through made him feel as worthless as a whore turning tricks in church by the time he came back to help Sammy. Dude’s taken all he can take and can’t lose nothing else. Marshella Rockwell and Jeff Mariotte are so fucking sympathetic and gentle with his character, chile, they need to be commended for this novel. Very rarely do video game adapted books work well with the source material, and the subsequent graphic novel that was produced about Sam Marcano was a failure and a half in a mound of horse apples, but this is a special gem. It’s gritty, raw, dynamic, and most of all, true to the nature of Lincoln Clay. Fans of the game will not walk away feeling betrayed.
