From internationally bestselling author Sandrone Dazieri and featuring “two of the most intriguing detectives to have emerged in recent years” (Daily Mail, London) comes the “explosive” (Booklist, starred review) second thriller in the Caselli and Torre series. In Rome, a passenger train speeds into the city’s main station, its first-class car full of dead bodies, the macabre discovery of which … the macabre discovery of which falls to Deputy Police Commissioner Colomba Caselli. The police then receive a claim of responsibility and the threat of more murders to come. But neither Caselli nor her eccentrically brilliant ally, Dante Torre, are ready to buy the terrorist link.
As the two unconventional investigators chip away at what the perpetrator wants everyone to believe, they put their own lives in jeopardy.
But Dante’s bizarre and traumatic past enables him to see what others miss, and in this case, to connect with a kindred spirit of sorts, a woman named Giltine who also experienced an intense trauma–one from which she emerged damaged and full of murderous intent. Making her especially lethal is that the rare mental illness she suffers from has her believing she’s already dead.
When Colomba and Dante find themselves on the outs with law enforcement they’re entirely on their own, faced with the responsibility of making sure the waters of Venice don’t turn red with blood.
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This series was a great find for me. After requesting this title, I hurried to read the first (Kill the Father). I’m very glad I did, I think I would have been a little lost if I hadn’t known the full backstory. There is SO MUCH going on in these books… The characters are complicated and battered (actually, more like fairly well broken). The plot lines are so tightly interwoven that teasing the threads apart is all but impossible until the very end – and even then, there are nearly as many unanswered questions are there are revelations. The violence is fairly graphic and the threats and painful truths are darkly difficult to stomach at times. It should make for a convoluted, depressing, uncomfortable read – but somehow it all comes together in a masterful way that renders the sum of its parts into a glorious whole that kept me frantically flipping pages even when I wasn’t entirely sure where I was or what was happening… This is a feeling that, upon reflection after finishing the book, feels intentional rather than a result of my personal reading style/experience; off-kilter is, after all, pretty much the name of the game for Dante and Colomba.
This book felt a little more fragmented than the first. I was equally enthralled by the action, and pulled into and through the story just as quickly (and consistently throughout). But there was something that felt just beyond my grasp with this one. In the first book, so much of the emphasis (even amidst the action) was on the characters – who they were, how they were made into who they were, and what all of that meant at the level of daily life. That isn’t to say that it wasn’t an action- and drama-packed book; it certainly was. But the action was underpinned by a psychological element that threaded throughout in such a way that every conversation, every nuance, every bit of minutiae felt like a revelation – even if you didn’t understand but a fraction of what was being revealed at any given time. In this book, that element was missing. There is still a great deal of psychological drama – don’t misunderstand – but it felt overwhelmed by the action this time, rather than underpinned by it. It meant the read was still fast and furious, but at the end of the book the “wow!” factor felt distinctly different, and I was left a little less satisfied about the psychological journey Dante and Colomba had undertaken. Despite Colomba’s increasingly difficult decisions (and their attendant increasingly intense ramifications), there didn’t seem to be much personality development between her character in the opening pages and in the ending ones – and a LOT happened in those spaces in between. Dante seemed to fare a little better in this regard, although the impact of the “HOLY COW!” end-twist (literally in the last pages) will have to play out before I can say for sure…
This is a really aggressive, really dark, really fascinating (both in terms of the straight-up story telling and the psychological studies contained therein) series and I am definitely on pins and needles waiting for the next installment!
My review copy was provided by NetGalley.
fabulous!!
Great series! The two main characters are interesting, quirky, and smart. The plot keep you interested as it twists and turns. And its set in Rome, so, really, who can resist that!