Bologna, 1944. World-weary Comandante De Luca is tasked with investigating three brutal murders, with the lives of ten Italian hostages on the line. The pitch-black prequel to the Inspector De Luca quartet, by the master of Italian Noir.

Portrait

Carlo Lucarelli was born in Parma in 1960. While researching for his thesis on the history of Italian law enforcement, he became intrigued by the Italian police force’s role in the political upheavals of the 1940s during and after the Second World War. From this seed sprouted his De Luca trilogy, later to grow into an oeuvre of more than twenty crime novels focusing on various characters. Lucarelli hosted the popular late night Italian television programme Blu notte misteri d'Italia, on unsolved crimes and mysteries, and he is the founder of the Italian crime-writing collective Gruppo 13. He is also a journalist and has worked for multiple Italian newspapers.