South Brooklyn. Not the Brooklyn of Spike Lee or Matty Rich, but acounterpoint: those left behind in the white flight. Mike is 19 and atloose ends: driving for Big Lou's Car Service and trying to decide ifhe should stay in college or drift into the omnipresent arena of localorganized crime. Mike's life is changed forever as he's forced toconfront the grim realities of wiseguy justice and his own culpabilityin its execution. Echoing such urban low-life classics as Price's The Wanderers and Selby's Last Exit, this novel offers an honest, unromantic look at Brooklyn's underclass. Tim McLoughlin was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he still resides. He is employed in the King's County Supreme Court. Critical praise for Heart of the Old Country: ''Set in the depths of working-class Brooklyn, this zippy first novel reads like an inspired cross between Richard Price's Bloodbrothersand Ross Macdonald's The Chill-part coming-of-age story,part thriller. Streetwise 19-year-old protagonist Mike spends his daysdriving for a car service and his nights attending college part-time.While trying to figure out which endeavor is more futile, he winds upon the periphery of a murder that will forever alter his destiny. Addto the mix Mike's marriage-minded neighborhood girlfriend, hisborderline-wiseguy bookie dad, and a sexy and sophisticated coedtemptress, and you've got all the ingredients for what may be a wholenew genre: Call it mook noir. A-''-Tom Sinclair, Entertainment Weekly ''Tim McLoughlin writes about South Brooklyn with a fidelity to people and place reminiscent of James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan and George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.Among the achievements of his swiftly paced narrative is a cast ofauthentic and frequently complex characters whose voices reflect dreamsand love as well as desperation to survive. No voice in this symphonyof a novel is more impressive than that of Mr. McLoughlin, a youngwriter with a rare gift for realism and empathy.''-Sidney Offit, authorof Memoir of the Bookie's Son