An entertaining and cleverly constructed book written by two experienced authors of literary detective novels, each having a characters who leads an investigation or more in successive novels. The two authors came together on a tv program and decided on a kind of game which was to write a novel out of two different cities. Their key characters, one a Sicilian inspector, a man, the other a woman in the Bologna police deal with a homicide through letters, memos, documents, go-betweens. The authors played a kind of chess game with each other through these two policepersons over a period of five years. It's a bit surreal, taken with a good pinch of salt. I gave it a four star rating for its successful endeavour, though it is of course a lightweight book, meant to be so : playful and founded on a game between writers, as if Simenon and Agatha Christie put Maigret and Poirot up to solving a murder in tandem without being both on the scene.
I thought its funniness and inventiness has a bit in common with Alan Bennett's 'An Uncommon Reader'. ( )