ISBN: 9780446581271
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Rating: A for story telling quality, but I can’t grade the reality
This is a true crime novel, one of the world’s biggest unsolved crimes in Italian history is the serial murders of couples as they make love in their cars in olive groves or other secluded areas.
Douglas Preston, co author of the Agent Pendergast novels the first of which is The Relic, wants to write a novel based in Italy and in order to learn the local police procedure he moves to Italy with his family in order to do research for his novel. What he doesn’t know is that he has rented a house that years ago played a part in one of the serial murders. Preston is introduced to local crime reporter, Mario Spezi, who will be Preston’s guide into the world of Italian police procedure. However, what Mario has to offer goes deeper than anything even Preston could imagine as the plot for one of his books. It is Spezi who tells of the serial murders and Spezi who has spent 20 + years investigating this case a part from the police because he feels they are off in the wrong direction.
The depth of this book is shocking. I can not even begin to understand the way the Italian police works because they allowed journalists to traipse around the crime scenes and look at the bodies. I know that I would be like Spezi if I had witnessed what he had seen. Even now days after finishing this book I can’t seem to find the words to express how disgusted I am at the level of corruption that this case has spurned. How many false arrests, how many promotions based on those false arrests and the idiots who force the evidence to fit their suspect.
I myself felt dirty as I closed the book knowing that these horrific crimes were still unsolved, but knowing that the crimes are unsolved because of the corruption and lack of dignity of the Italian police makes it that much harder to come clean.
