Colomba Caselli

In this fascinatingly complex thriller, two people, both shattered by their pasts, team to solve a series of killings and abductions - a ruthlessly planned escalation that turns out to be merely the visible surface of something far more sinister. When a woman is beheaded in a park outside Rome and her six-year-old son goes missing, the police unit assigned to the case sees an easy solution: They arrest the woman's husband and await his confession. But the chief of Rome's major crimes unit doubts things are so simple. Secretly, he lures to the case two of Italy's top analytical minds: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli, a fierce, warrior-like detective still reeling from having survived a bloody catastrophe, and Dante Torre, a man who spent his childhood trapped inside a concrete silo. Fed by the gloved hand of a masked kidnapper who called himself "the Father", Dante emerged from his ordeal with crippling claustrophobia but also with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and hyperobservant capacities. All evidence suggests that the Father is back and active after being dormant for decades. Indeed, he has left telltale signs that signal he's looking forward to a reunion with Dante. But when Colomba and Dante begin following the ever more bizarre trail of clues, they grasp that what's really going on is darker than they ever imagined.

From the wildly inventive mind of thriller master Sandrone Dazieri, whose first novel featuring investigators Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre, Kill the Father, was an international bestseller, comes the ingenious second novel in the series, Kill the Angel. In Rome, a high-speed train hurtles into the city's main station with a carriage full of dead bodies, the macabre discovery of which falls to Deputy Police Commissioner Colomba Caselli. Subsequently, the police receive a claim of responsibility and the threat of more murders to come. But neither Caselli nor her eccentrically brilliant ally, Dante Torre, are yet ready to buy the terrorist link. As the two maverick investigators puncture the façade of what the perpetrator wants everyone to believe, they come close to dying several times. Not for the first time, Dante's bizarre childhood, during which he was kept confined for years in a concrete silo, enables him to see what others miss, and in this case, to connect with a kindred spirit of sorts, a woman named Giltine who experienced an equally bizarre childhood from which she emerged damaged, lethal, and full of murderous intent. Adding to Giltine's eerie fierceness is that, as the victim of a rare mental illness, she believes she's already dead. She's unacquainted with fear. And that makes her the most formidable foe Colomba and Dante have faced yet. As the story climaxes, the duo finds themselves utterly on their own, on the outs with law enforcement and the only ones with a chance to make sure the waters of Venice don't turn red with blood.

From thriller master Sandrone Dazieri, here is the startling conclusion to the internationally bestselling Caselli and Torre trilogy in which two damaged but deductively brilliant detectives must sort out what is real and what is imagined. Reeling from a deadly bombing in Venice and her investigative partner Dante's disappearance, Detective Colomba Caselli retreats to the rural countryside outside Rome to nurse her wounds. When an apparently autistic teenager appears in her yard, covered in blood, he leads her to a brutal crime scene where nothing is what it seems. As Colomba gets pulled into the investigation and the body count spirals upward, she is implicated in the violence. Soon, she's convinced that a powerful villain is working in the shadows to cause the carnage and frame her, but the only person who can help her is Dante-and he hasn't been seen in over a year and is presumed dead. Colomba is sure he's alive and out there somewhere, but will she find him before it's too late? And can she clear her name and be free of the far-reaching legacy of the villain known as the Father? Bursting with action, ingeniously plotted, and filled with one unexpected twist after another, Kill the King is a shocking and satisfying conclusion to this breathtakingly original crime series.