7-7-2007

Rocco Schiavone is the usual grumpy, rude, rumpled cop we have come to know in previous novels chronicling his investigations. But in this one he is also, in his own way, happy. And in fact here we are a few years earlier, when his wife Marina has not yet become the ghost of Rocco’s remorse: she is alive, engaged in work and with friends, and able to involve him in all aspects of existence. Before she falls murdered. And here we are when it all began….
“Do you know what we leave behind of us? A tangled skein of white hair to be swept out of an empty apartment.”
Rocco Schiavone is the usual grumpy, rude, rumpled cop we have come to know in previous novels chronicling his investigations. But in this one he is also, in his own way, happy. And in fact here we are a few years earlier, when his wife Marina has not yet become the ghost of Rocco’s remorse: she is alive, engaged in work and with friends, and able to involve him in all aspects of existence. Before she falls murdered. And here we are when it all began.
In July 2007, Rome is plagued by tropical downpours, and just in the days when Marina has left home because she has discovered Rocco’s “dirty accounts,” a case of good guys happens to the vicequestor. Giovanni Ferri, the 20-year-old son of a journalist and an excellent law student, is found in a marble quarry, beaten and then stabbed. Schiavone begins to investigate the murdered man’s orderly, ordinary life. Days later the lifeless body of one of Giovanni’s friends is discovered, in a gruesome coincidence, on the street. Matteo Livolsi, that’s his name, was also finished off violently, but this time a strange circumstance allows us to hook a lead: there is no blood on the corpse. Now, the sniffer animal inside Rocco Schiavone can set out, with his usual unscrupulousness and thirst for justice, on the trail of “the son of a bitch who stabbed two 20-year-olds in the base of the skull.” But if it were the story of a lone balk, it would be too smooth. Instead, Rocco has an appointment with tragic fate, and he doesn’t know he has it. And that appointment bequeaths him a lurking enemy nearly a decade later, when, memory over, we return to the present and Rocco has to close the case for good.
The rhythm of Antonio Manzini’s noirs gives the sense of a thousand-geared mechanism that never misses a beat, spinning in unison with the existential travails of a character who lingers in the mind, while his gaze rests critical and sad on the social reality of the times that are passing.