Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes - refreshingly unusual for Sicily. But Inspector Salvo Montalbano, as honest as he is streetwise and as scathing to fools and villains as he is compassionate to their victims, is not ready to close the case - even though he's being pressured by Vigàta's police chief, judge, and bishop. Picking his way through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta firepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.The Shape of Water is followed by the second in this phenomenal series, The Terracotta Dog.

    As one of the world s greatest tenors, Maestro Vezzi, is found brutally murdered in his dressing room at Naples famous San Carlo Theatre, the enigmatic and aloof Commissario Ricciardi is called in to investigate. Arrogant and bad-tempered, Vezzi was hated by many, but with the livelihoods of the opera at stake, who would have committed this callous act? Ricciardi, along with his loyal colleague, Maione, is determined to discover the truth. But Ricciardi carries his own secret: will it help him solve this murder?

    Read an exclusive excerpt at BookBrowse today.The hottest summer of the twentieth century. A tiny community of five houses in the middle of wheat fields. While the adults shelter indoors, six children venture out on their bikes across the scorched, deserted countryside.In the midst of that sea of golden wheat, nine year-old Michele Amitrano discovers a secret so momentous, so terrible, that he daren’t tell anyone about it. To come to terms with it he will have to draw strength from his own imagination and sense of humanity. The reader witnesses a dual story: the one that is seen through Michele's eyes, and the tragedy involving the adults of this isolated hamlet. The result is an immensely powerful, lyrical and skillfully narrated novel, its atmosphere reminiscent of Tom Sawyer, Stephen King's Stand By Me and Italo Calvino's Italian Fairy Tales. This is Ammaniti's third book, but his first to be published in the USA.

    Called in to investigate, melancholy Detective Ciccio, a secret admirer of the murdered woman and a friend of her husband’s, discovers that almost everyone in the apartment building is somehow involved in the case, and with each new development the mystery only deepens and broadens. Gadda’s sublimely different detective story presents a scathing picture of fascist Italy while tracking the elusiveness of the truth, the impossibility of proof, and the infinite complexity of the workings of fate, showing how they come into conflict with the demands of justice and love. Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alberto Moravia all considered That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana to be the great modern Italian novel. Unquestionably, it is a work of universal significance and protean genius: a rich social novel, a comic opera, an act of political resistance, a blazing feat of baroque wordplay, and a haunting story of life and death in the Eternal City.

    To avenge what you have done you will die. But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. The next day he and his hunting companion are both dead. The police investigation is inconclusive. However, a modest high school teacher with a literary bent has noticed a clue that, he believes, will allow him to trace the killer. Patiently, methodically, he begins to untangle a web of erotic intrigue and political calculation. But the results of his amateur sleuthing are unexpected—and tragic. To Each His Own is one of the masterworks of the great Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia—a gripping and unconventional detective story that is also an anatomy of a society founded on secrets, lies, collusion, and violence.

    Highly visual and unforgettably sad, Without Blood is a haunting book about damage, longing, memory, and forgiveness. Ann Goldstein's superb translation captures Baricco's effortless prose style and gives people in Britain the opportunity to experience this gem of a novel that has already delighted hundreds of thousands of readers across Europe.

    Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created its most infamous document?　 Eco takes his readers here on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. This is Eco at his most exciting, a book immediately hailed as his masterpiece.

    An investigation ensues and as each of the victim's neighbors is questioned, the reader is offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome. Each character takes his or her turn center-stage, giving evidence, recounting his or her story the dramas of racial identity, the anxieties and misunderstandings born of a life spent on society's margins, the daily humiliations provoked by mainstream culture's fears and indifference, preconceptions and insensitivity. What emerges is a moving story that is common to us all, whether we live in Italy or Los Angeles. This novel is animated by a style that is as colorful as the neighborhood it describes and is characterized by seemingly effortless equipoise that borrows from the cinematic tradition of the Commedia all Italiana as exemplified by directors such as Federico Fellini. At the heart of this bittersweet comedy told with affection and sensitivity is a social reality that we often tend to ignore and an anthropological analysis, refreshing in its generosity, that cannot fail to fascinate.

    In 1982, all of Italy was joyous, having just won the World Cup after a decades-long championship drought, while in Rome hard-drinking Commissario Michele Balistreri was a brash cop investigating the murder of beautiful young Elisa Sordi. Despite the Commissario’s brash style, or perhaps because of his arrogance, the murderer is never found. As the years pass, the file goes cold and Balistreri grows wiser, if perhaps a little more damaged and a little less fearless, consumed by the guilt of having left Sordi’s murder unsolved. In 2006, Italy is once again on the brink of a World Cup victory and Balistreri is losing the battle against his personal demons when Sordi’s mother suddenly commits suicide. Emerging from a haze of antidepressants and self-pity, Balistreri is spurred to action and picks up the case again, sure that Elisa’s killer is still out there, simply awaiting his next opportunity to strike.

    Inspector Bordelli is one of the few policemen left in the deserted city. He spends his days on routine work, and his nights tormented by the heat and mosquitoes. Suddenly one night, a telephone call gives him a new sense of purpose: the suspected death of a wealthy Signora. Bordelli rushes to her hilltop villa, and picks the locks. The old woman is lying on her bed - apparently killed by an asthma attack, though her medicine has been left untouched.With the help of his young protégé, the victim's eccentric brother, and a semi-retired petty thief, the inspector begins a murder investigation. Each suspect has a solid alibi, but there is something that doesn't quite add up . . .

    A few months ago, in the dead of night, her husband, an up-and-coming journalist, plunged to his death at the top of a high-rise construction site. The police ruled it an accident. Sanda is convinced it was anything but.Launching her own inquiries, Sanda finds herself on a dangerous trail, working the same case that she is convinced led to her husband's murder. An investigation which is deeply entwined with a series of disappearances that has swept the city, and brings Sandra ever closer to a centuries-old secret society that will do anything to stay in the shadows.

    The final days of the Fascist Republic. World War II is nearing it's frantic conclusion. The regime's days are numbered, it's disgraced leaders know it, and their quibbling over pieces of the post-war pie is getting more desperate by the minute. Commissario De Luca has been handed a murder investigation that will draw him into the private lives of the rich, priviledged, and powerful. With Mussolini's house of cards ready to collapse, he faces a world mired in sadistic sex, dirty money, drugs, and murder.Carte Blanche, the first installment in Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca Trilogy, is more than a first-rate crime story. It is also an investigation into the workings of justice in a state that is crumbling under the weight of profound historic change. The De Luca Trilogy is set during one of modern history's seminal moments and describes a nation's ardent search to rediscover its moral bearings after being torn in two by civil strife and political corruption. Threatened by the machinations of a decaying political class, De Luca, himself reminiscent of the disenchanted Dashiell Hammett PI, is a simple man doing a tough job as best he can. Even when he has wrapped up his investigation, Commissario De Luca will still have to face one final, fateful decision.

    When she’s called to investigate a gruesome murder near a mountainside town, she’s paired with a young male inspector she’s not sure she trusts. But she has no choice—in this remote town full of secrets, eerie folktales and primal instincts, the killer seems drawn to a group of local children, who may be in grave danger.As Teresa inches closer to the truth, she must confront the possibility that her faculties, no longer what they once were, may fail her before the chase is over.

    A face-off between a man and a boy. The same blood runs through their veins. One, Daniele Mallarico, is a successful illustrator at the peak of his career. The other, Mario, is his four-year-old grandson who has barely learned to talk but has a few tricks up his loose-fitting sleeves all the same. The older combatant has lived for years in almost complete solitude. The younger one has been dumped with a grandfather he barely knows for 72 hours. Starnone’s sharp novella unfolds within the four walls (and a balcony!) of the apartment where the grandfather grew up, now the home of his daughter and her family, where the rage of an aging man meets optimism incarnate in the shape of a four-year-old child. Lurking, ever present in the conflict, is the memory of Naples, a wily, violent, and passionate city where the old man spent his youth and whose influence is not easily shaken.

    Tabucchi has now written a thriller, but one with a subtle intellectual depth not usual in that genre. The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro intriguingly reflects on current social issues: crime, police corruption, yellow journalism, and the courts -- both of the law and of public opinion. Tabucchi hooks the reader on page one of this book and the story advances with electric and unflagging suspense. A gypsy discovers a headless body; Firmino, a young journalist who writes for a scandal-sheet, takes up the case; the headless corpse turns out to be that of one Damasceno Monteiro, an employee at an import-export company who, having stumbled upon a heroin smuggling ring at his work, had stolen a drug shipment; and, the police are supressing evidence -- all the stuff of familiar daily news, here made riveting in the hands of a rare and brilliant writer.