The First Fingerprint, by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

9781847245939
MacLehose, 2009 (UK)
originally published as La premiere empreinte, 2002
translated by Ian Monk
341 pp
trade paper ed.

Moving away from Italy and into France for a while, I've just started Xavier-Marie Bonnot's series featuring Police Commandant Michel de Palma, aka the Baron.  I'm still not sure why that's his nickname, but oh well.  The First Fingerprint is a police procedural with a serial-killer  plot line that draws on the study of prehistory to help guide the story, which takes some very odd turns before getting to the big reveal.  Filled with enough suspects and red herrings to make any mystery reader happy, it's a good start to the series -- intelligently written and interesting enough to make me want more of Bonnot.

Michel De Palma is approaching his 25th year on the force; he knows retirement is just around the corner, although he's not quite ready for that step yet.   He's a dedicated cop, not averse to bending the rules or slamming a suspect's head on a desk until blood is drawn, even though some of his younger colleagues protest loudly against his violent methods.  He is also known for getting in the faces of his superiors when he doesn't agree with their orders.  Yet even criminals he's dealt with in the past know that he's "straight and a very good policeman."  

A walker finds the body of prehistory lecturer Christine Autran floating in the ocean below Le Torpilleur off the Marseille coast.

Le Torpilleur

 She had been strangled, tossed into the sea, and her neck had been broken.  De Palma is put on the case, and recalls that some time earlier, another victim, Franck Luccioni, a "small-time thug,"  had been found in the same exact spot near an underground cave, a site of prehistoric activity, now underwater.  The previous death showed no signs of violence, and was found to be the result of a diving accident.   At first, he finds the coincidence odd, but when Luccioni's sister shows up with information about her brother, he begins to wonder if there might be some connection between the two cases.  That's a tough enough job, but when other murder victims turn up, the stakes get even higher for De Palma and his team.

If this is just the first novel in the series, I can't wait to get to the rest.  The First Fingerprint  has an enigmatic mystery at its core, and in Bonnot's hands, the murder investigation is anything but dull. It wanders into the academic world and the experts in the field of prehistory. Where some writers will fill space with lengthy exposition to explain a particular subject to their readers,  Bonnot's  characters offer sufficient explanations that don't become sloggy or overburdened with detail. The pacing is spot on, and the conflicts between law-enforcement agencies and case jurisdiction seems realistic.  The sense of place is very real as you move through the city streets or stop alongside the road with De Palma and look out at the sea, listening to the birds or the "tot-tot" of freighters.  There are also a number of social concerns expressed throughout the novel, and considering that this is the first book of this series, the characters are already on their way to being well developed, at least in the context of their professional lives.   Some readers might find De Palma to be a bit more unsympathetic than a cop or lead character should be, but his no-nonsense refusal to put up with crap helps make him who he is. I also find it refreshing, although I'm  wary when an officer of the law feels he has  to use excessive violence to get people to give him what he wants.   On the flip side, I had part of it figured out a quarter way through the book -- although kudos to the author for completely throwing me off with a curveball I didn't see coming.  Sometimes the story verges toward the melodramatic, but to be fair, that happens close to the ending, so it's excusable.

With plenty of suspects, several murders, a twisted and zig-zaggy line of reasoning and deduction to follow through to the end, there is more than enough in this novel to keep crime-fiction readers happy.  It's intelligently written, has interesting characters and the plot is  just odd enough to be different. I recommend, mainly to fans of translated crime fiction or to crime fiction readers who are looking for something well above average in their reading.

crime fiction from France

The Black Rose of Florence, by Michele Giuttari

9781408703601
Little, Brown, 2012 (UK)
originally published as Le rose nere di firenze, 2010
translated by Howard Curtis
450 pp
Hardcover ed.


I've now  come to the fifth and most current of Giuttari's Michele Ferrara books published in English, The Black Rose of Florence.


Strange things are happening in Florence, the first of which is that someone has taken a knife to the face of a dead woman awaiting her funeral. When the police get involved, they discover tobacco leaves under the body -- which Michele Ferrara interprets as a message aimed at himself.  After all, he did just return from Rome after being on temporary assignment in the Anti-Mafia Investigation Department, a measure intended to get him out of Florence after just barely missing being killed in a bombing attack.  Now he's back, and Florence, "seemed to be doing everything it could to put him off staying."  His wife, Petra, has long been trying to convince her husband that it may be time to retire; he isn't quite ready.  After the strange incident with the dead body, Ferrara begins to wonder if it could possibly be the work of satanists who hold their black masses in "deconsecrated churches." While trying to puzzle out this mess, and a shooting in the Via di Novoli,  the body of young Giovanna Innocenti, 24,  is discovered in her home -- naked, bound to her bed with handcuffs, with an artificial black rose between her legs.  Ferrara, who declares that "this was all very unusual," now has his work cut out for him.  The girl's family seems very indifferent toward her death and all but refuse to cooperate with police; in the meantime, the police department  is under a great deal of pressure when the press gets hold of the story.  Anonymous notes speaking of "the hooded ones" sent to Ferrara seem to hint at some sort of  secret society behind the weirdness -- but is it really a group of Satanic worshippers, or perhaps Freemasons, or are there others he doesn't even know about? When others start to die, Ferrara knows there's no time to lose.

The Black Rose of Florence is a police procedural, and as far as the work the cops put in to solve these strange crimes, it's pretty good -- Giutarri's background and knowledge shine through here.  But far from being the "masterpiece of detective fiction" as noted on the blurb, it's filled with Giuttari's standard clichéd elements I've discovered in pretty much all of his novels:  the higher-ups who run things yet remain clueless about exactly what police work entails, the lack of cooperation between the various law-enforcement agencies in Italy,  corruption at the highest levels, conspiracies, and the true powers behind the powers who pull all the strings in the country.   I have to say that I wondered when Giuttari's fascination with Satanists (à la the real-life Monster of Florence case) was going to appear in novelized form, and here it is.   But then again, he has flirted with the secret society aspects in some of his other books -- here it's just become a bit more blatant, detracting from the  good scenes where the policemen are doing their jobs. I don't understand  why, with his experience as a cop, he feels he has to sensationalize these crimes and make them larger than life when he could have played it absolutely straight and done a better job.

Maybe it's just me, because so many other readers enjoyed this book, but I thought it was more like something in the sensational thriller range (the ones I tend to skip over) rather than a "masterpiece of detective fiction." On the other hand, waiting to see how it all was going to play out kept me reading, so that's a good thing. I will probably read the next one when it's translated and published, but let's just say that there are better Italian crime-fiction novelists out there.

tre libri di Giutarri: A Death in Tuscany, The Death of a Mafia Don, and A Death in Calabria

There are three books between Giutarri's  first Michele Ferrrara novel  A Florentine Death (which, as I noted earlier, really bothered me) and The Black Rose of Florence, the latest installment of the Ferrara series (#5), which will get its own post since it's the latest of Giutarri's novels to be published.  After my experience with A Florentine Death,  I probably would have left the series alone, but having bought the other four, I just couldn't abandon ship without giving them a read.  Here's how they shook out: I liked A Death in Tuscany in 3.3 stars sort of way, thought The Death of a Mafia Don was not so bad, but didn't really care much for Death in Calabria.

9780349120089

Abacus, 2009 (UK ed)

originally published as La loggia degli innocenti, 2005

translated by Howard Curtis

381 pp

trade paper

9780349121970

Abacus, 2010 (UK ed.)

originally published as Il basilisco, 2007

translated by Howard Curtis

369 pp

trade paper

A Death in Tuscany and The Death of a Mafia Don are sort of companion pieces in which the events in the latter are related to the former; actually Death in Calabria is sort of related to these two but only kind of marginally.  

In A Death in Tuscany, a young, teenaged girl who was found in the Tuscan woods and brought to the hospital ER dies as a result of a heroin overdose.  The case catches Ferrara's personal interest, especially when no one seems to have reported her missing after some time.  Ferrara develops a few theories about the girl: she might possibly be an illegal immigrant; he also wonders if she might not have been a victim of human trafficking, a crime on the rise in Florence largely credited to the Albanian gangs who have also been supplying the North African drug dealers in Italy.  Another idea he's playing around with has her as the victim of pedophiles.   But some irregularities in the hospital reports and other factors, lead Ferrara to suspect that there's something very wrong going on here, and he is keen to get to the bottom of it. But while he's gathering information on that case, his friend, bookstore-owner Massimo Verga, has vanished along with a woman he's been seeing -- and the Carabinieri are on his trail after the recent murder of the woman's husband.   

Death of a Mafia Don begins with a bang -- literally -- as Ferrara becomes a victim of an unknown bomber while on his way to work in Florence.  It's not even a month since the 9/11 attack in the US; the rumors are running rife that the bomb may be the work of terrorists.  But some suspect that Ferrara himself may have been the target due to events that happened at the end of Death in Tuscany, a suspicion which is later confirmed when the target of a second bombing, who is closely linked to Ferrara, is killed.  In the meantime, a newspaper reporter stirs up the specter of a possible Mafia-Al Queda connection, and Mafia wars are looming on the horizon. 

9780349123097

Abacus, 2011 (UK)

originally published as La donna della 'ndrangheta, 2009

translated by Howard Curtis

323 pp 

trade paper 

Before the author gets to Italy in A Death in Calabria, he makes a stop in Manhattan, where a group of policemen enter the lobby of an apartment building. When the doorman goes to help them, he is attacked.  The bad guys make their way to an apartment, where they kill six people.  The niece of the apartment's owner, who is eventually identified as Rocco Fideli, is waiting for her uncle to join her and her parents to watch the New York Marathon, and uses her key to get in when there is no answer, and discovers the carnage. The real police get to work to solve the crime, and eventually,  a detective from the NYPD, along with FBI agents travel to Rome, where they will become part of a joint investigative team with Italy's Anti-Mafia Investigation Department (the DIA).   It seems that Ferrara has been reassigned temporarily, after the events in the previous two novels,  to the DIA as Director of Investigations, currently working on a number of  unsolved crimes.  Tracing the Fideli connection, the team realizes that they're dealing with groups of Calabrians known collectively as the 'Ndrangheta; it seems that different families within the 'Ndrangheta are at war with each other. The Americans want to solve the brutal murders, and the DIA seems to be their only hope.

There are several commonalities between these three novels.  There are people in the higher echelons who either seem to have no clue about the realities of police work or no real police experience, yet they run the show and dictate how the police must act. Of course, Ferrara is known for being a troublemaker and for doing things his way.  Second, there's a distinct lack of cooperation between the various law-enforcement agencies in Italy -- for example, the Carabinieri keeps its distance from the Squadra Mobile so that in some cases, even when ordered to share evidence and keep each other abreast of developments, the two groups hold some revelations close to their respective chests.  Third, there is a great deal of corruption at the highest levels, some of which seeps down into the police department so it's often difficult to know who to trust. Then there's Ferrara's investigations, which seem to lead him down the path of conspiracy theory -- often to the Freemasons.  These same traits also find their way into the newest novel, Black Rose of Florence, but more on that later.  There is also the sense that in each and every case, there is someone behind the scenes who pulls the strings, often known only by some silly codename, and others jump to his or her tune in fear of some kind of exposure.

A Death in Tuscany, followed by Death of a Mafia Don are the better two of these "tre libri di Giutarri;" with Death in Tuscany the best of the group.  Here the action is a bit more believable than in Mafia Don, although in all of the books, the characters seem a bit cardboardish, most of the action is over the top, and really, I think Ferrara might have been a much more sympathetic character if he wasn't so obviously modeled after his creator.  Sometimes I felt bad for Michele Ferrara, especially in Death of a Mafia Don, but when I got down to Death in Calabria, I wondered why he was even a character in the novel.  Most of the real action occurs in New York; in Italy, Ferrara has much less of a role than in the previous books of the series.  In all of these novels there is very little in the way of necessary sense of place that transports the reader into Italy, a definite drawback for those who want to soak up the local atmosphere.

If you've started the series and are invested in it, then by all means don't miss these; Giuttari has come a long way since A Florentine Death, and for the most part the stories in these three novels are definitely interesting at their core.  There is a lot of procedural in all of these novels but they are exciting in parts; I think, however, if the author would just relax and not get so involved in conspiracies they'd be much better.

The Age of Doubt, by Andrea Camilleri

9780143120926
Penguin, 2012
originally published as L'età del dubbio, 2008
translated by Stephen Sartarelli
274 pp
(trade paper ed.)

Still trying to get through the crime fiction of Michele Giutarri (which, I must confess is not so easy but I'm not a quitter)  and finally catching up with things at home after my 3-week vacation,  I had to pause to read Camilleri's latest offering in English, The Age of Doubt.  Finishing it in one sitting, there is no doubt in my mind that Camilleri just keeps getting better and better.  Each reading of this author's novels  just solidifies how much I love this guy -- his writing, his series, and above all, his Inspector Montalbano.

As with many of the recent books in the series, Age of Doubt begins with a dream -- in this one, Montalbano walks into the station to let Catarella know he'll be away on a surprise trip to visit Livia in Bocadesse.  Catarella responds that Salvo can't go to Bocadesse because he died the day before. He's also told  he can't investigate the case because "he's too personally involved."  Even worse, Livia's not sure she can make it to the funeral.   After analyzing his dream, it's back to work; he gets stuck in a major traffic jam caused by the washing away of the road.  In the first of a long line of cars, he comes across a woman whose car is sticking out over the edge of the washed-out road and  rescues her, taking her home where she dries off and where he calls Gallo to come and get them.  She's not his type, so they spend the time waiting talking about her.  It turns out she's Vanna Digiulio, who was on her way to the Harbor Office to meet her aunt's yacht, also named Vanna,  at 10 a.m.  Gallo arrives; the yacht, as it turns out, is not supposed to arrive until 4, so Vanna waits with a book at the police station until it's time to go the harbor.  But it isn't long after she leaves there's a call that sends Montalbano to the harbor -- it seems a dead man has been found in a dinghy and that it had been picked up by the Vanna.   When Montalbano goes to talk to the Vanna's captain, the yacht's owner, Livia Giovannini, complains about having to be stuck there and Salvo gives her a list of things she might want to do to pass the time.  When she wonders about how to get around, Salvo suggests she use her niece's car, to which she replies "What niece?"

While trying to figure out the corpse's identity, Salvo meets Lt. Laura Belladona of the Harbor Office and zing!!!! There is an instant mutual attraction, a dual-pronged Cupid's arrow that  lands simultaneously in both of their hearts.  As the story progresses, Salvo, now 58, begins to wonder if it's real love he's feeling for this  much younger woman who makes him absolutely crazy or if it's something else completely:

"He hadn't done this sort of thing when he was sixteen, and now he was doing it at fifty-eight?  Fifty-eight, Montalbà! Don't you forget it! Or was it perhaps the folly of old age that made him act this way?"

The Age of Doubt continues Camilleri's tradition of a good mystery at the core of the novel, surrounded by the characters that are by now like old friends to regular Camilleri fans.  There are a number of incredibly funny scenes here, including Mimi Augello's undercover work (giving "undercover" a whole new connotation here!) , but there are also very serious moments.  In just one example, Salvo muses critically about the government's handling of the immigration issue as he  witnesses a load of hopeful  immigrants being rounded up by the authorities at the harbor.  The book is very well paced, and as usual, Camilleri takes his readers to the Vigata shoreline with the sights, smells, and tastes of this small corner of Sicily.  This is also one of the more poignant Montalbano stories I've read; Sartarelli's translation making it even more so .  Someone give that man an award for his work!!

I highly recommend this book to anyone who's followed Montalbano from the beginning -- although all of the series novels accentuate Montalbano as a person, this one goes beyond the norm.  I loved it.

review link: Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, by Paul French

9780143121008
Penguin, 2012
(first published by Penguin Australia, 2011)
259 pp
(hardcover ed)

If you've seen or heard about this book recently, and you're wondering if it's readworthy, the answer is definitely yes.  I read this over the course of the last three weeks while on vacation and had trouble putting it down. Although the book revolves around an old, unknown and unsolved murder, it's not your average true-crime sort of thing --the book  is intelligently written and takes place in Peking (modern Beijing) as the Japanese army is arriving at the city gates.   If you're at all interested, I've posted my review about it  in the "real stuff" (nonfiction) section of this online reading journal.  

A Florentine Death, by Michele Giuttari

9780349120065
Abacus, 2011
originally published as Scarabeo, 2005
[first English edition - 2007]
translated by Howard Curtis
357 pp
(trade paper ed.)

A Florentine Death is the first novel in Michele Giuttari's crime-fiction series featuring Michele Ferrara, the head of the Squadra Mobile in Florence.   His later works in the series are A Death in Tuscany (2008), The Death of a Mafia Don (2009),  A Death in Calabria (2010), and this year's The Black Rose of Florence.  While Giuttari's name may not be well known outside of his books, in 2001, Giuttari and prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (known for his handling [or mishandling] of the Amanda Knox case in 2007)  reopened Italy's "Monster of Florence" case, based on their belief that "the  murders were committed not by a sole killer but by members of a Satanic sect who used body parts from the killings as ritual offerings." Later, Douglas Preston and his co-author, Italian journalist Mario Spezi would take issue with the ideas raised by Giuttari and Mignini in their well-known work The Monster of Florence, leading to Spezi's arrest and an accusation against Preston for being an accessory to the murders. In A Florentine Death, it is obvious that Giuttari draws on his personal experiences -- the main character, Michele Ferrara, is also involved with the Monster of Florence case.

In this novel, the focus is on the hunt for a serial killer, someone who not only murders his victims but also savagely mutilates them as well.  Ferrara already has a number of crimes on his hands, but this one becomes personal as he begins to receive strange, anonymous letters that seem to imply that Ferrara is on the killer's list as well.  The murderer also indicates that Ferrara will have to wait his turn until the end of the killing spree.  Trying to find a connection between the victims eludes police, and a key witness who may hold all of the answers seems to have gone missing.  As the investigation proceeds slowly and the public is clamoring for the police to solve these gruesome cases,  a second storyline develops, in which a young grad student meets an American journalist who threatens to upset her relationship with her lover. 

The best part of this mystery comes barreling at the reader toward the end when the link is finally revealed and things start to make sense, and the underlying motive turns out to be completely credible.   However, in all honesty, I can't say that this book really did it for me as a whole.  The story is just flat, number one, never really building up to much suspense as I waited for something to sink my teeth into that would carry me through to the end.  The anti-gay focus bothered me, but not nearly as much as the unrealistic dialogue that occurs throughout the story.  Take the rape scene in the middle of the novel, for example.  The young grad student, Valentina, is in bed with her journalist boyfriend who forcibly sodomizes her after she screams for him to stop (and the author doesn't flinch in describing the pain she undergoes).  While I've read multiple books where someone is victimized like this, here, after it's all over:

"When he came back from the bathroom, he was as white as a corpse.

He did not dare lie down next to her. He sat down on the bed, shamefaced.

Valentina was stilll crying. She didn't dare move, she was afraid it would hurt if she did.

'I ... I don't know what came over me. I swear to you. It was like...I don't know! I'm a monster, Valentina, a monster! How could I?'

She turned slowly towards him. Without saying a word, she gestured to him to lie down.

She placed a hand on his chest. 'It's possible,' she murmured, 'that I still love you.' "

A few sentences later,  the author even has her thinking that she's proud of "having given him an erection."  I mean, seriously? Really? 

The mystery, rather than being "gripping" and "cleverly plotted" as noted in the back-cover blurb, was actually a bit clunky.   Not too far into the book, it becomes obvious as to the "who," and the investigation meandered and became jumbled until the last few pages provided some order and cohesion.  As a seasoned mystery/crime-fiction reader, waiting until the end for things to happen without periodic hooks in interest  just doesn't do it for me.  The sense of place is okay, perhaps not as well developed as I'd hoped, the characters are sort of one-dimensional, and the sex scenes seem to be there to ensure a wider range of readership rather than adding anything to the storyline.  On a more personal level, I give the author kudos for his mention of The Necronomicon at the beginning of the novel, due to my extreme affection for all things HP Lovecraft.

I'd say give it a try but beware. It does have its fans -- the novel has garnered some 4-star ratings at Amazon, Goodreads and LibraryThing, so there are people who do think highly of this book.  Since Giuttari's Black Rose of Florence is on my tbr list for this year's International Dagger, and since I have this compulsion to read an entire series to get to the newest book, I will be reading the rest of the Ferrara novels; my understanding is that the second installment is a bit better.  Hopefully the problems I discovered in A Florentine Death will be chalked up to first novel issues; I have more of Giuttari's books sitting here waiting to be read.

A much more positive review than mine can be found at the bookblog Hush Darling, I'm Reading if you are interested.

back from vacation and it was a good one!

glacial valley in Tracey Arm, Alaska

From rainy days in Seattle and freezing fjords of Alaska, back to the tropical Florida heat, I've spent  the last three weeks in a whirlwind vacation, but I'm finally home again and ready to get back to business as usual.  I did manage to do a LOT of reading, although not much in the way of crime fiction -- so I'm ready to delve right back in to the mystery game.

It's so good to be back! I missed everyone.