To keep his family alive, Jack Falon becomes a speechwriter for a Mafia financed political campaign. The candidate, an heir to a franchise of car dealerships, is an arrogant, bumbling, yet pliable member of Chicago's suburbanite aristocracy vying for a seat in the Unites States Senate. Jack tries to hover above the political and criminal intrigue but is pulled down by his brother's inability to control the Arapahos, a vicious street gang, and his affair with a fellow campaign worker, a younger woman of gothic predilections. His paramour is kidnapped when Jack refuses to cooperate with a Kansas City outfit attempting to insinuate itself into Jack's political juggernaut by toppling Chicago's crime patriarch, Lupo the Wolf. When a journalist threatening to expose Jack's past criminal associations stalls the campaign, Jack must scour the city for his woman while fending off intimidation from local gangs run from Atlanta's federal prison. Very Few Have Excellence is the fifth in the Jack Falon series and has all the action and naked violence that marked Jim Arneberg's previous books: Into an Unseen Distance, A Long Drop to Eternity, A Man Is What He Hides and Not Seeing the Stars.