Again, in my opinion, what made them suck, was the fact that the author had the opportunity to run with some of the well known, more interesting characters from the novel and the movie, but instead chose to run too far with a boring Johnny Fontaine character. There was a chapter on Fontaine that was very interesting and Sinatra like, but Winegardner went a little overboard with Fontaine overall.

As I said, I thought that his Geraci character was pretty interesting, and in Revenge, I did enjoy the Carlos Tramonti storyline and I really liked the Paradise character, but felt that Winegardner did not take the opportunity to bring the Paradise character to his fullest potential.

With The GF's Revenge, I do give credit to Winegardner in that he seems to have done his homework as far as real life mobsters and polticians go and creatively applied some of those real life happenings to his charaters in the book.

Revenge had some really good potential, but it never really reached that potential. However, out of the two that he wrote, if I had to pick one, I would pick Revenge over Returns.