Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 3 reviews on
The summer of 1992 was cold in southern Italy, but that's not what made it memorable. The chilling Mafia violence currently sweeping Sicily has spread to Puglia, much to the consternation of Pietro Fenoglio, a local officer of the Carabinieri. Fenoglio, recently jilted by his wife, must simultaneously deal with his personal crisis and the gang wars raging around Bari. Progress on the case has reached a standstill until a Mafia member, accused of killing a child, decides to collaborate, revealing the inner workings of organised crime in the area. The brutal killings are stopped, but the mystery of the boy's murder must still be solved, leading Fenoglio into a world of deep moral ambiguity, where the investigators are hard to distinguish from the investigated.
Praise for Carofiglio:
"The author occupies a niche similar to Erle Stanley Gardner and John Grisham. The genre is flourishing and Carofiglio has endowed his hero with a discriminating taste for good food, but none of their relish for brutality. Violence is kept at arm's length." Times Literary SupplementKIRKUS: "Carofiglio's engaging main character. Fenoglio is a sensitive, polished figure who has managed to keep his idealism intact in a career meant to break it; he is as comfortable philosophizing as he is citing the public safety code. When he recalls a joke about a drunkard searching for his keys under a streetlight rather than in the dark street where he lost them, he realizes his search is failing for the same reason: "We look where it's light, even though that's exactly how not to solve the problem." Solving this case, Carofiglio shows us, requires a leap into the darkness.
PW: This is sure to win Carofiglio, a former prosecutor who specialized in organized crime, a wider U.S. audience.
CrimeTime: Who better to tell you how the Mafia works than the man who in real life was an Italian prosecutor and advisor to the government's anti-Mafia Committee? This at times meditative book teaches us much about gangland's childish rituals and Italian police procedure but still racks up some tension before its realistic conclusion. It's a book for adult readers, about gangsters who are little more than viscously bad boys.