Actually she is Grace Willand Crowell, daughter of an immensely wealthy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs whose family lives in Georgetown.
She soon begins a sexual affair with the hapless Charley, who is now buffeted between the increasingly strident emotional demands of the two women—as well as carrying out his primary duties, that of eliminating various people across the United States seen as threats to various high-ranking members of the Prizzi family.
Condon attacked his targets, usually gangsters, financiers, and politicians, wholeheartedly but with a uniquely original style and wit that made almost any paragraph from one of his books instantly recognizable.
Reviewing one of his works in the International Herald Tribune, the well-known playwright George Axelrod (The Seven-Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter), who had collaborated with Condon on the screenplay for the film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, wrote: "The arrival of a new novel by Richard Condon is like an invitation to a party.... the sheer gusto of the prose, the madness of his similies, the lunacy of his metaphors, his infectious, almost child-like joy in composing complex sentences that go bang at the end in the manner of exploding cigars is both exhilarating and as exhausting as any good party ought to be.
"In Prizzi's Honor, Condon's normal exuberance was somewhat curbed by choosing to narrate the events through the viewpoints of its various semi-literate gangsters, which limited the scope of his imagery.
The real-life Heller was a television director in New York City in the 1950s, '60s, and 70s, who initially lived on Long Island and then moved to a house on Rockrimmon Road in Stamford, Connecticut.
[3]Kirkus Reviews had mixed feelings about it: ...the sketches of Mafia viciousness and hypocrisy are often deliciously mordant; and, with those movie characterizations to bolster Charley and Maerose in the reader's mind, there's enough dark whimsy and oafish pathos here to provide earthy, quirky, fast-moving entertainment.