The role of women in the Italian mafias has long been overlooked. Reduced to victim status and relegated to domestic life in a male-dominated society, women serve as the mafia's respectable facade: virtuous and docile. It is hard to picture these immaculate figures married to and raising brutal killers.

But, as Milka Kahn and Anne Veron reveal in this absorbing book, women have always been at the heart of Italy's criminal organizations, as the guarantors of mafia culture. While the men are behind bars or on the run, it is left to their wives and mothers to uphold and pass on the 'family...