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The author known as an Italian James Ellroy delivers “a raw, extremely dark portrait of a crime and its aftermath” (The Washington Post). During a bungled robbery attempt, Raffaello Beggiato takes a young woman and her eight-year-old child hostage. He later murders both in cold blood. Beggiato is arrested, tried, and sentenced to life. Undone by his loss, the victims’ father and husband, Silvano Contin, plunges into an ever-deepening abyss until the day, fifteen years later, when the murderer seeks his pardon. The wounded Silvano turns predator as he ruthlessly plots his revenge. A riveting story of guilt, revenge, and justice, Massimo Carlotto’s Death’s Dark Abyss tells the tale o...
"Carlotto is the reigning king of Mediterranean noir." — The Boston Phoenix An unscrupulous womanizer, as devoid of morals as he once was full of idealistic fervor, returns to Italy where he is wanted for a series of political crimes. To avoid prison he sells out his old friends, turns his back on his former ideals, and cuts deals with crooked cops. To achieve the guise of respectability he is willing to go even further, maybe even as far as murder.
Giorgio Pellegrini, the unforgettable hero of The Goodbye Kiss, has been living an “honest” life for eleven years. But that's about to change. His lawyer has been playing him, and now Giorgio is forced into service as an unwilling errand boy for an organized crime syndicate. At one time, Giorgio wouldn't have thought twice about robbing, kidnapping and killing in order to get what he wanted or to get out of a mess like this. But these days he's too long in the tooth to face his enemies head-on. To get back to his peaceful life as a successful businessman he's going to have to find another way to shake off the mob. Fortunately, though Giorgio's circumstances may have changed, deep down he's still the ruthless killer he used to be.
From the author of Death’s Dark Abyss and The Goodbye Kiss comes an extraordinary tale of life on the run. Massimo Carlotto’s odyssey began in 1976 when, as a member of a militant leftwing organization that had fallen awry of the ruling powers, he was arrested and falsely accused of murder. Unwilling to play the role of fall guy in a political power struggle, he chose to flee the country rather than wait for a verdict that the whole country knew was a foregone conclusion. He first went into hiding in the French underworld and then made his way to a Mexico embroiled in bloody class conflict. Betrayed by a Mexican lawyer, he returned to Italy in 1985 and spent six years in prison, during w...
After serving years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, Massimo Carlotto received a presidential pardon in 1993. The first book he wrote as a free man was The Fugitive telling of his years on the run from a politically motivated murder charge. This gritty tale takes readers from the French underworld to a Mexico besieged by guerilla warfare. Virtually a handbook on how to live life on the lamb, The Fugitive is also a vibrant novel full of vivid underworld characters and breathtaking moments that Carlotto recounts in the cool, lucid prose that has become his trademark.
In Carlotto's The Campagna Trail, Inspector Campagna uses an old friendship with notorious drug dealer Roby Pizzo in a Machiavellian attempt to keep the peace. But when an interfering new police chief demands Campagna bring down the Mafioso who heads Pizzo's gang, Campagna must use every weapon he has to save his job - and his life. Meanwhile in Carofiglio's The Speed of the Angel, a writer in crisis strikes up an unlikely friendship with a mysterious woman he meets in a quiet seaside café. As their conversations deepen, and their obsessions darken, their drug-fuelled relationship begins to spiral, in this haunting tale of damnation and redemption. Finally in De Cataldo's The White Powder Dance, the city police are put on the trail of a baby-faced new graduate in the Milanese banking sector. As the pursuit accelerates through back streets and skyscrapers, it becomes clear that there is more to organised crime than getting your hands dirty.
“[An] outstanding fable of greed, corruption and moral abandonment. Filled with echoes of Dante’s Inferno.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Poisonville is noir par excellence—there’s murder, moral ambiguity, and a less than heroic main character. In this bestselling novel, however, the real killer is not an individual but an entire system. The heavily industrialized northeast, Italy’s richest region, is undergoing dramatic change. It once drove the nation’s economic boom—a regional superpower, affluent and arrogant, a land that abided only its own rules. But then the factory owners began moving their operations across the border to former Soviet countries where labor wa...
Massimo Carlotto has been described as "the reigning king of Mediterranean noir" ( Boston Phoenix), "more noir than even the toughest American noir" (Josh Bazell, author of Beat the Reaper), "about as gritty as they come" ( The New York Times), and "the best living Italian crime writer" ( Il Manifesto). Here, making his American debut, is Carlotto's most famous and beloved serial character: ex-con turned private investigator Marco Buratti, a.k.a The Alligator. Closing the door on a crime ridden past, Marco Buratti plans to spend the rest of his days in the darkness of a seedy nightclub sipping Calvados and listening to the blues. But things don't quite work out as he planned: though he may b...
Italian crime writing is replacing that of Scandinavia as the fastest growing in the genre. The huge success of Niccolo Ammaniti, followed by the Gabriele Salvatore film of the same name took the UK by storm. Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalban series (Picador), Carlo Lucarelli's Almost Blue (Vintage) and carte Blanche (Europa) and Massimo Carlotto's The Good-bye Kiss (Europa) are further evidence of this surge. These authors, and others, are represented in this volume, which contains nine gripping and often darkly hilarious stories.
When we think of the Italian Mafia, we think of Marlon Brando, Tony Soprano, and the Corleones iconic actors and characters who give shady dealings a mythical pop presence. Yet these sensational depictions take us only so far. The true story of the Mafia reveals both an organization and mindset dedicated to the preservation of tradition. It is no accident that the rise of the Mafia coincided with the unification of Italy and the influx of immigrants into America. The Mafia means more than a horse head under the sheets it functions as an alternative to the state, providing its own social and political justice. Combining a nuanced history with a unique counternarrative concerning stereotypes o...