Matt Chandler is a senior in high school, living in a dying mill town he is desperate to get out of. Leni Brand, a gorgeous girl in the school is bribing him with (kinky) sex, though Matt isn’t sure what he’s being bribed for. It turns out that Leni’s father, a well-known doctor in town, is in some kind of trouble and Leni is sure he borrowed money from a loan shark.
Matt is willing to be bribed – why not! – but is skeptical of the loan shark business. Then Leni is attacked at a steel warehouse and ends up in the hospital, and a few days later Matt comes up against two hardened thugs at the warehouse but manages to get away from them, even shooting one in the leg, albeit by accident.
It appears that Leni was right about the loan shark and it also appears that they are happy to kill people who get in their way. Stumped for what to do, Matt talks to a woman who worked at the steel company for many years, Nadya Jackson. Nadya, the forty-year-old mother of a friend of Matt’s, had seduced the underage Matt a few years earlier and she is not at all happy to see Matt again.
Unfortunately, Nadya gives Matt some very bad news – it isn’t a sleazy local loan shark that Leni’s dad borrowed money from and that Matt and Leni have annoyed, it’s the boss of the Youngstown mob, a guy named Nicky Torricelli, better known as Nicky T. Matt and Leni are now in serious trouble and they spend the rest of the book trying to take Nicky T down before Nicky takes them down.
- Matt Chandler, high school senior, football player and Golden Gloves boxer
- Leni Brand, Matt’s gorgeous but kinky friend whose father is in trouble
- Patty Abel, Matt’s girlfriend, a female “tough guy”
- Carole Abel, Patty’s call girl cousin
- Nadya Jackson, mother of Matt’s friend who seduces Matt
- Frank Tadich, union member who leads a citizen’s committee trying to put Nicky away
- Lonnie Rose, local criminal lawyer who is a member of the citizen’s committee
- Nicky Torricelli, a/k/a Nicky T, head of the Youngstown mob
- Johnny Ingot, Nicky T’s enforcer
- Ingram T. Phillips, Jr., Esq., Nicky T’s mobbed-up lawyer
Praise for 18: Taking Down Niki T
As the plot accelerates and the suspense builds it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the this is also a coming-of-age novel – the main characters begin as older adolescents but by the end of the book they have become something close to serious adults. - George T. Greene
Although the hero of the book is a young man, the novel also brims with strong female characters – Patty Abel and her call-girl cousin, Carole, the semi-pedophile Nadya Jackson, and of course the inimitable Leni Brand. I don’t just want to read more and more about Leni – I want to be Leni. Victoria-Lauren DeLong
The characters are so alive it seems as though any second they will stroll off the page and buy you a drink! - T. Hooper