Carlo Lucarelli

I nearly didn’t read this book because it concerns itself with a serial killer: a subject I think I have just about reached my lifetime limit on. However I had read several good reviews though I think the bigger factor for me just now was that it is blessedly, mercifully, wonderfully short. I am a bit fed up with massive, bloated tomes.

It is a story in three voices. In Bologna in Italy we meet Simone a young, blind man who rarely leaves the attic of his family’s apartment where he spends show more most of his time listening to a peculiar combination of jazz music, police scanners and other people’s mobile phone conversations. Ispettore Grazia Negro works for a special police unit which deals with serial crimes. She and the Unit’s head have linked several murders of young students together and have finally convinced judicial prosecutors that there is a single case to be investigated. The third voice is that of the killer who needs to quiet the noises in his head.

Although overall I liked the book I thought that only one of these voices, that of Simone, worked consistently well as both a mechanism for developing a strong character and for advancing the story. Lucarelli has really done an outstanding job of depicting what it is like to be this blind individual…not the stereotyped generic blind person common to much fiction but this particular man. He can’t understand descriptive words that others use and so has invented his own descriptive language which assigns colours to voices and so on and his description of falling in love with the voice singing a particular song he heard on his school bus radio is quite exquisite. The voice of Grazia is less engaging for me, partly because she spends half of the short book being impacted by her period pain (this is how you know it’s a book written by a bloke) and partly because I thought she flip-flopped too much between accepting the rampant misogyny around her and being angry about it. The voice of the killer was the least original of the three and could have been left out of the book entirely in my humble opinion.

As a story I found the book more consistent as we were led down a path of first linking the murders together then inserting our three characters into the narrative and having them .meet up with each other in intriguing ways. This could have been a cliché-fest but Lucarelli avoided all the pitfalls to produce a really gripping, if somewhat violent story. However at no point was anything gratuitous and in a book so short it would have been almost impossible to linger too long on any blood-soaked scene so I think even those who shy away from darker books could cope with this.

Even with its flaws this book did draw me in quickly and deeply to its setting and the overlapping, claustrophobic worlds of its three protagonists. The sparse writing style and bare kind of translation, which kept as many native Italian words as could be gotten away with, combined to make it a quick yet immersive reading experience. I gobbled up the whole thing in one day and then felt compelled to hunt down some of the music mentioned within the story to make myself an Almost Blue playlist which is not something I do very often at all. I am looking forward to other books by this author.

my rating 3.5 stars show less

A wonderful mystery set in early 1950s Bologna as the superpowers duel for intelligence that can be used in nuclear weapons. One possibly useful physicist dies in an auto accident and two months later his wife is brutally murdered. Is there a connection?

De Luca is temporarily rehabilitated from his Fascist past to investigate the murder under cover. Presenting himself as Morandi, an engineer or perhaps a music impresario, De Luca penetrates the social circle around the dead professor and show more his wife. Bodies begin to accumulate while De Luca is drawn further into the intrigue.

One of the best things about the book is the reappearance of De Luca's old comrade in arms, Pugliese, who plays a crucial role as the novel winds down.

Any mystery is a game between author and reader. Lucarelli plays fair with the reader, strewing the clues about and letting the reader build his or her case.

Strongly recommended. show less

I picked up Judges in the library, principally because it contains a story by Giancarlo de Cotaldo, the writer of one of my favourite European TV series – Romanzo Criminale. I have yet to encounter a novel of his in English, so this was the next best thing.

Judges is an anthology of three novellas by leading Italian crime writers; each story centres on an Italian Judge prosecuting a case. (The reader needs to bear in mind the investigative role of a Judge in Italy).

Andrea Camilleri, show more renowned author of the Montalbano series, kicks off with Judge Surra. This is a story set shortly after Italian unification, about a Judge from out of town who is parachuted into a Sicilian village, blissfully unaware of the criminal undercurrents that swirl around him. Surra seemingly blunders along, narrowly avoiding continuing disasters and amazing the locals with his sang froid and coolness in the face of the local mafiosi. Or is he a lot smarter than we might think? This is an excellent and humorous short story, but it is marred by a clumsy and unnecessary afterword.

The Bambina by Carlo Lucarelli was probably my favourite story of the three. It’s centred on a female Bolognan Judge who looks so young she is nicknamed “The Baby” by the cops. While she has police protection as a matter of routine, it seems totally unnecessary, as she is only investigating a minor white collar fraud. Events then take a turn that gives her case a lot more significance. Lucarelli is able to surprise the reader and pack plot twists into a very short space. (The ending will make more sense to people with a bit of knowledge about real-life crime in Italy, BTW). I’ll certainly be looking for more of Lucarelli’s work.

De Cotaldo’s story is called The Triple Dream of the Prosecutor. This is a tale about a Judge who is prosecuting a corrupt local mayor, a man who bullied him as a child, giving rise to the suspicion that the Judge is biased. In the story, he dreams about things going wrong on the day of the trial, in a looping fashion somewhat like Groundhog Day. The construction is complex and a little confusing, and I found this story rather unsatisfying. I guess I expected something more hard-boiled from the author of Romanzo Criminale. (Could somebody PLEASE publish Romanzo Criminale in English, BTW)?

Overall I thought these three novellas were worth reading and something a bit different from the usual police procedurals. Good stuff. show less

Chiamiamolo romanzo, chiamiamolo noir, releghiamolo nel regno della fiction.
Peccato che questo libro sia il vero e proprio resoconto di un'inchiesta su uno dei misteri più impenetrabili del mondo, ovvero dove vanno a finire i rifiuti tossici e radioattivi prodotti dalle industrie dell'occidente.
Oltre ad essere un manifesto dedicato a tutti coloro che hanno sacrificato se stessi per dipanare la matassa.