Description

Post-war Los Angeles glitters with possibility and with danger. Three men of the Licata family walk the same city on entirely different roads, bound by blood and by secrets none of them has fully told the others.

Nick Licata has become what he always intended to become: the don of the Los Angeles crime family, charismatic and powerful and completely certain the ends justify the means. What it costs his wife Josie and their children is a calculation he has chosen not to make.

His nephew Joe has always known what kind of man he wants to be. Honest. Sober. Free. But wanting it and living it are two very different things. His drinking is tearing apart his marriage, and Nick, who sees him as an asset too valuable to lose, keeps pulling him deeper into a world of dangerous money and dangerous loyalties. When blackmail and alcoholism arrive together, Joe must decide how much integrity a man can afford to keep. He finds the strength to say no to all of it, and just when the honest life he always wanted finally seems within reach, a diagnosis changes everything.

Nick’s son Carlo is trapped in Detroit, married into a crime family that views him as useful but never quite legitimate. He dreams of Havana, of the Lemonade Lounge, of a life that finally fits. What he finds in Cuba is glamour, revolution, and consequences he didn’t calculate.

From the nightclubs of 1950s Los Angeles to the revolution-torn streets of Havana, The Scent of Lemons, Part Three is a novel about power, loyalty, and what happens to a family when the sins of one generation become the inheritance of the next.