A mysterious murder in present-day Milan intertwines with a cold case from the 1940s in this thrilling novel about film, freedom, censorship, and the persistent threat of fascism.
An acclaimed director, Manlio Parrini, decides to return behind the camera. Having abandoned cinema at the height of his success because he found the industry to be "a place without truth," he now, in his 70s, has a special story in mind: a film about Augusto De Angelis, a pioneer of Italian crime fiction in the 1930s. The violent death of De Angelis remains, for Parrini, an unsolved case marked by the stench of injustice and blind fascist censorship, a story that needs to be told now more than ever.
Yet just as Parrini finds a producer for his project and begins writing the screenplay with his friend and accomplice Sara De Viesti, another mystery bursts into his life: the murder of the elderly widow Bastoni, who owns the villa next door to his. "Robecchi has the natural gift of graceful irony. Some are born pianists, others as illustrators; he was born to make us discover, with a smile, the unexpected grotesque in situations, the ridiculousness of those who can only gaze at their own navel." -Il Venerdì di Repubblica Alessandro Robecchi is a former columnist for Il Manifesto and currently writes for Il Fatto Quotidiano and Tuttolibri of La Stampa. Robecchi is one of Italy's most beloved crime authors, with his ten novels in the Carlo Monterossi series having sold more than 600,000 copies.
Gregory Conti has translated numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Italian including works by Emilio Lussu, Rosetta Loy, Elisa Biagini, and Paolo Rumiz. He is the translator of Stefano Mancuso's two previous books, The Nation of Plants and The Incredible Journey of Plants, and recently translated The Child Is the Teacher by Cristina De Stefano. He is a regular contributor to the literary quarterly Raritan.
