Antonio Manzini’s new novel, blackest and meanest Italy, evil as the only chance for redemption.

In Samantha’s small bedroom, a poster of a wolf woman, “long hair, yellow eyes, a body to take your breath away, claws instead of nails,” a woman who does not give up in front of anything and knows how to defend herself and pull out her teeth, stands out on the wall. Samantha, on the other hand, at 17, has gathered only sadness in life and has no future ahead of her. It is not just the poverty of the family; it is that people like her no longer have a place they can call their own in the order of the universe. The same is true for all the inhabitants of Colle San Martino: wasted lives, individuals who, though elbow to elbow, drag their existences in total solitude, each with his own sordid secrets, without ever a moment of collective life, without anything that is a common thing. Over the village dominate, respectively from the top of the manor house and the church tower, Cicci Bellè, “owner of everything,” and a reactionary priest, Father Graziano. The two hate and fight each other; they oppress and exploit, impose blackmail and conditioning. Cicci Bellè has only one affection, for her son Mariuccio, a 32-year-old big boy with the brain of a 5-year-old; Father Graziano always carries his nephew Faustino, a spoiled child cared for by a silent Russian woman, Ljuba. Samantha has no comfort in the boy she is engaged to, not even in her conformist schoolmates; she can only communicate with her friend Nadia. Amid seedy events that intertwine within the walls of homes, the challenges of the two bullies and the vagaries of a tragic fate first bring down the protagonist, later allow her to take revenge on her life with a reckless blow, just like a true wolf woman; an accident, a serious bereavement, an act of madness, are the ironies of life that little Samantha manages to take advantage of.
The pen of Antonio Manzini, who described a character carved in readers’ memories as Rocco Schiavone, depicts individuals and stories of vivid and pitiless realism in a noir without a crime, a novel of a lonely girl and at the same time the choral tale of a small town. A kind of happy ending turns everything into a sour fairy tale. But behind this appearance, the wolf woman’s final sneer makes it clear that La mala erba is also something else: it is a novel about the gloom dissolve of two overbearing men, about revenge that does not restore justice, about the inexorable and repetitive cycle of oppression in a marginalized province that is nothing more than the immense, isolated province in which we all live.

A cold case for Deputy Superintendent Schiavone, who takes it not as the usual 10th-grade breakup, but with painful compassion, because this is perhaps his cruelest investigation. Antonio Manzini proceeds another chapter in his character’s great novel. A unique novel composed of multiple intricate detective stories that explore the complexities of human nature.
A retired doctor discovers human bones in the woods. It is the corpse of a child. Michela Gambino of the Aosta forensics unit, in private so imaginatively paranoid that Rocco Schiavone often feels like he is in a psychiatric ward, but extraordinarily competent, manages to determine the main details: about ten years old, death by strangulation, probable violence. Examination of the findings, a complex and obstacle-filled investigation, finally leads to a name and a date: Mirko, who disappeared six years earlier. His mother, a single woman, had never resigned. He had last been seen sitting on a low wall near the school after class, apparently waiting for someone.
A cold case for Deputy Superintendent Schiavone, who takes it not as the usual tenth-grade breakdown, but with painful compassion, and with the disgust of having to deal with the secret codes of an inhuman world. An investigation that forces him to logic, to proceed systematically, to decipher messages and clues from underground environments. And to collaborate closely with colleagues and subordinates, whose private lives he becomes increasingly familiar with: Antonio’s reckless loves, Italo’s shipwreck, Casella’s and Deruta’s recent romantic accommodations, even D’Intino’s unexpected sensitivity, the ultimately comic fixations of the two from the lab. Surrounding him are the echoes of the past of which the ghost of Marina, his murdered wife, is the throbbing commentary. He realizes more and more that he is inadequate for other loves. It is as if loneliness is becoming the demanding companion he cannot do without. This is perhaps Rocco Schiavone’s cruelest investigation. The loneliness of the child victim is total, perennial, metaphysical, and hovers over the busy affairs of all the characters making them feel utterly futile to Rocco, confirming him in his deep-seated pessimism. In The Bones Speak, Antonio Manzini proceeds another chapter in his character’s great novel. A unique novel composed of multiple intricate detective stories that explore the complexities of human nature.

She died in her apartment Sofia Martinet, struck in the head with a heavy object. As Rocco Schiavone pursues a new investigation, some returns from the past emotionally shake the deputy detective, who almost catches himself repenting of his own tough exterior: perhaps because an inviting allusion to the emancipating power of love hovers everywhere. Love of any kind.
Schiavone does not believe this. All elements point to one culprit: motive, time, place, material and computer traces, psychology. But he doesn’t believe it by the skin of his teeth. “The archaeologist, Sara, said she sees nothing in my eyes. It’s usually the same impression I get when I look at a murderer.” Instead, in the eyes of suspect number one he saw something: “Fear.”
She died in her apartment Sofia Martinet, struck in the head with a heavy object. The only clues a repeated “J” in her diary, and a pale stripe around one finger, a sign of a ring always worn and coldly removed from the corpse. In her seventies, a house full of books, including several valuable antiquities, an internationally renowned name in her academic field, an art historian specializing in Leonardo da Vinci. The investigation carried out by Rocco Schiavone, with his unmistakable style of work and life, has two junctures. The first concerns the conduct of the victim’s son; the second is a discovery the latter had made while digging into the scientific works of the Renaissance genius. “A turning point in the world of Leonardo studies.”
Suddenly, a telluric shock also emotionally complicates Rocco’s restless days: Sebastiano, the friend from childhood, and from exploits on the edge of legality, who had been missing for quite some time, sunk in his secret hunt alongside his young wife’s executioner, resurfaces. Old acquaintances.
And he is not the only, shocking return from the past to turn old dear acquaintances into spectres.
A perhaps more lonely Rocco Schiavone, but at moments self-critical, who almost catches himself repenting of his own rind of toughness: perhaps because an inviting allusion to the emancipating power of love hovers everywhere. Love of any kind.

One ordinary morning, by chance, Nora recognizes a face on the train. It is the person who destroyed her life. She and her husband Pasquale are the owners in Pescara of a well-established tobacco shop. And it was in this one six years earlier during a robbery that a thief killed their only son Corrado. Nora cannot believe that the executioner of an innocent boy-their innocent boy! – could be free after such a short time. She cannot believe that her son’s life is worth so little. But it is, between the conviction for manslaughter and prison benefits. From this moment on, Nora and Pasquale cannot go on living without getting their own restorative justice. The husband seeks the shortest and most immediate route. Nora, on the other hand, after a difficult search to flush out the man, devises a more refined plan. Paolo Dainese, however, the murderer, has struggled to rebuild his life and, floundering, is managing to get back on his feet.
For years Antonio Manzini had had this story in mind, based on a true fact. And he wanted to write not a thesis novel, but a psychological novel about three souls and how they react when faced with a moral alternative with no sure answer. And reading these pages one is left bewildered, not only because the author has written a story different from his plots that we are more familiar with, but especially because he has succeeded in telling, within the interweavings proper to those who are masters of stories, the impossibility of making a clear judgment. Impossibility of the reader, and of the writer; but also of the characters who live the story. These can choose (and their choices are different) but because they are forced to do so, just as life forces. This kind of short circuit, between reason and life, is the ethical doubt that Manzini explores throughout.

A new investigation for Rocco Schiavone forced to investigate a case of malpractice from a hospital bed. And in the meantime, the deputy detective is almost fifty years old, certain hardships are softening, perhaps a love affair appears. In the background the private affairs of the team take on more prominence. And invariably a shadow, of that darkness that never leaves him, watches from a street corner out there. Rocco Schiavone, deputy detective in Aosta, is hospitalized. A bullet hit him in a firefight, he lost a kidney, but that does not make him any less anxious to move, any less restless. In the same days, during a surgery similar to the one he underwent, another patient lost his life: Roberto Sirchia, a wealthy self-made entrepreneur. An unforgivable mistake, a resounding scandal. Sirchia’s widow and son, she a profligate rich woman, he, highly ambitious but utterly lacking his father’s energy, point the finger at malpractice. But, a transfusion bag with the wrong blood type, in the eyes of Rocco who is bored and cannot suppress his cop instincts, is too gross a carelessness. He also feels a deep gratitude toward the one who would be the number one culprit for the mistake, namely the chief medical officer Dr. Negri; he seems to him a good person, a man as melancholy and disenchanted as he is. In the brusque, irreverent style that is part of his identity, the deputy detective begins to lead the investigation from the corridors of the hospital that he clandestinely fills with smoke of various kinds.
If it is murder, there must be a motive, and it must be sought outside the hospital, in the folds of the victim’s life.
Inside the hospital rituals, the smells, the inedible food, the harassing neighbors, Schiavone feels like a caged lion. But he is a wounded lion: it is exhausting to gather clues, difficult to direct his men from a distance, he can only rely on intuition, impressions of people, data on the workings of the health care machine. And the author gives a lot of space to psychology and atmosphere. Rocco Schiavone is almost fifty years old, certain hardnesses are softening, perhaps a love affair is appearing. In the background the private affairs of the team take more prominence. And invariably a shadow, of that darkness that never leaves him, watches from a street corner out there.

Seven amusements around the world of books. Satire, irony and sarcasm about the cynicism that pervades the culture industry.
“Yet when he began working in publishing, his intentions were otherwise. Books are needed. Books are the building blocks of a society, they said, books are the barrier to single thinking, to theocratic terrorisms, to uncritical thinking, books are the lifeline and the level of civilization of a society. Books are us, they represent us, we think and live because there are books to read. All the sons of bitches in the world have lashed out against books, against the freedom to express oneself, to say what is in one’s heart, even if it is opposed to the powerful, even if it is opposed to dictatorships. […] And now? Accounts, large distribution, eye-catching graphics, back cover, editorial discount, in a word: marketing.”
Between grotesque realism and psychological thriller seven stories about the culture industry, critical, sarcastic, which ideally connect to the polemical vision of On the Verge of the Cliff against the cynicism and speculation that threaten the freedom of books; but in them above all one feels the inventiveness of a great writer and the ability to attract and imprison in the purity of telling.

A cash van disappears, literally into thin air. It was loaded with nearly three million, the revenues of the Saint-Vincent casino. Statements by one of the guards, left stunned on the ground, set in motion a fairly routine robbery investigation. But there is something in the intuition of Deputy Superintendent Rocco Schiavone-he calls it a “smell”-that doesn’t quite fit, something that surprisingly links everything to a previous case that keeps gnawing at him. “He had to start over, the murder of accountant Favre was still waiting for a principal, and maybe there was a detail, a smell that he hadn’t perceived.” Against the advice of police chiefs and prosecutors who would like to clear the field for a more high-minded investigation, he thus begins to grind clues toward a truth that, as usual in his experience, raises heavy existential questions. His method is far beyond the orthodoxy of a well-combed official, and his life is full of complications and contradictions. Perhaps because of a repressed desire for fatherhood, her relationship with young Gabriel, her lonely neighbor, is increasingly constraining. Lupa “the big puppy” has settled permanently into her day. But the shadows of the past thicken ever more ominously: the death of the Baiocchi killer, his wife Marina’s murderer, and her corpse never found; the precise, verified feeling of being under the lens of the services, for unknown reasons.
It seems that in this novel many knots come to the comb, secrets and mysteries; and indeed, interwoven with the main thread, various stories unfold. So do the personal stories (loves, vices, dreams) that facet all of Rocco’s shambling associates in police headquarters. A complexity and richness that give proof that Antonio Manzini projects himself beyond the detective novel, toward a more universal representation of social life and especially psychological and moral life. And so it is that the character Rocco Schiavone, with his twisted way of being passionate, with his way of suffering, of asking for affection, is destined to remain etched in the memory of his readers.

Rocco is down in the dumps, betrayed by Caterina who left the Aosta police station, abandoned by his friends, a soul in pain wanders around the city with only a desire for carnal and meaningless relationships. His almost paternal bond with his teenage neighbor, Gabriele, is also complicated because his mother, Cecilia, a fragile, dark, contradictory character, finally breaks into the story. This time Deputy Superintendent Schiavone has to deal with a story of gambling, of greed. As he goes up and down from Aosta to the Saint-Vincent casino a handful of kilometers away, he comes up against the inconsistencies of a state that profits from the bankruptcy of families dragged to the bottom of the barrel by the demon of gambling. Despite the complexity of the investigation Rocco does not forget and tries to mend fences with his Roman friends: Sebastiano is under house arrest, Furio and Brizio barely speak to him. But the task is made more difficult because the shadow of Enzo Baiocchi, who was captured by the police and has now become a turncoat, still stretches over the deputy policeman’s life. The surprises that fate has in store for Schiavone are not over, and there are many questions to be answered: what happened to Caterina? Who was she working for? And why is the prosecution resuming its investigation into the death of Luigi Baiocchi? Play your game is a hard-hitting, disturbing novel, a very high-tension noir.

For the first time together, these short stories, which have already appeared in various themed anthologies, give us a portrait of Deputy Superintendent Rocco Schiavone. They are five tiles that help define the character for those who already know him and serve as an introduction for those who have never read him: a grumpy, transgressive, rough policeman, often bordering on brutality, who nevertheless knows the heart of men and always knows where he stands.
A portrait of deputy police officer Rocco Schiavone. Five tiles that help define the character for those who already know him and serve as an introduction for those who have never read him. Short stories already published in various anthologies that this volume puts together for the first time. The first-which gives its name to the entire collection and is little less than a short novel in breadth-has a macabre, almost horror-like beginning: at the cemetery, inside a gentile chapel, an unknown corpse is found lying on top of another’s coffin; the only clue is a strange wedding ring. But soon the story takes the typical paths that inspire Antonio Manzini: grafting existential hardships, social denunciation, and deep feelings onto a mysterious police investigation; all told with an ironic humor bordering on sarcasm, made up of quick jokes and paradoxes, which in the short measure of the stories even seems to be accentuated by concentration. The other stories that follow-three friends on a mountaineering trip that ended in death; a cheating soccer game between lawmen; a crime in the “closed room” of a train; a harmless hermit killed in an abandoned little church-are investigations that lead, according to the black humor that never leaves Schiavone, to “an uncomfortable, bleak, sad conclusion, more than the sky of this city.” He, the undisputed protagonist, is a cop who is not upstanding, often bordering on brutality, but who can recognize a real person wherever and however he shows up. A man who cannot stand the time in which he lives, for so many reasons, but mostly because it has snatched from him the most important thing in life.

On the backdrop of Manzini’s long-awaited new novel are Aosta and Rome, the opposite poles where Rocco Schiavone’s life unfolds and the threads of the affair we had left at the end of 7-7-2007 are reknotted, when Adele had not yet had justice or vengeance, she killed by mistake by those who thought they were targeting Schiavone, that Enzo Baiocchi who returns to agitate the deputy superintendent’s mind and dreams. And while Rocco is still the object of insinuating suspicions by the top police brass, and reacts by disinteresting himself in every activity of the Aosta police headquarters, the corpse of a transsexual surfaces in the waters of the Dora; first they proceed to search the dead man’s house, and here is the first surprise: the apartment turns out to be totally empty, not a piece of furniture, not a piece of clothing, and not even a sheet of paper, as if it had been sifted through thick and thin. None of the neighbors have noticed the move, everyone pretends not to know; but what is behind the facade of that respectable building in Aosta that belongs in its entirety to a single disturbing owner? When even Judge Baldi decides to gloss over the transsexual’s case, the smell of the Secret Service reaches Schiavone’s nostrils stronger than the smell of pot. On that case that many want to make look like an unimportant murder Schiavone can shed light only by ignoring procedures and acting in his own way; but he also has something else on his mind, finding Enzo Baiocchi on the run to escape Sebastiano’s revenge, a race against time in pursuit of his friend and killer…

The hamster carousel recounts a robbery and grand scheme. Four thugs of the Roman mala, René, Franco, Cinese, and Cencio, set up a bank robbery, but something goes wrong. Meanwhile in the palaces of power, in the offices of the Treasury Ministry, some bureaucrats organize a hallucinatory plot to drastically solve the pension problem. Between these two seemingly out of touch worlds, between the center and the periphery, at the top and the bottom of the social ladder, everyone is looking for the same thing: the ultimate big score, the one that fixes you forever. In Manzini’s world, evil, violence, vulgarity, conceit, spare no one. Whether it is an Inps employee who thinks he is a vigilante, the generals of the Secret Service, dark and unmentionable characters, the most ramshackle small-time bandits. Dictating the action is always the fever of wealth, the eagerness of the sneak, the mirage of the “breakthrough.” No one is really a decent person, a citizen in good standing, not even the elderly pensioners who on the strength of a secure monthly allowance think only of themselves, or the resentful young people. Everyone is trying to outwit the other, just to stay ahead, just to grab an advantage in the struggle for survival. There is running and chasing each other, like on a wheel, between comic and tragic, comedy and noir. Toward the final bang.

Between Moldova and Rome, two worlds compared, a harsh and cruel fate, the strength and beauty of those who choose to fight, not to give up. From the eyes of a foreigner the portrait of how we are made, the feeling of our time. The inside of a good middle-class Italian family… The tragedy of a mother far from her son, here in Italy to help another person for work. The detachment, the new family, love. The encounter with suffering, the will to live and the contradictions of a condition common to so many women, mothers, families.

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.

This volume brings together short stories published in several anthologies by this publisher, starting with Capodanno in giallo. Gathered together, they make it possible to reconstruct what can be called the antecedent of a character who has wide literary notoriety today, vice-policeman Rocco Schiavone.
This volume brings together short stories published in several anthologies by this publisher, beginning with Capodanno in giallo. Gathered together, they make it possible to reconstruct what can be called the antecedent of a character who has wide literary notoriety today, Vice-Policeman Rocco Schiavone. A cop who is anything but good-natured, rather eccentric in the shoes of the enemy of crime. In the morning, he lights up a joint to give himself momentum; when it happens, he does not disdain a few bargains with the proceeds of a foiled heist; he is rough with everyone, brutal with the bad guys, impatient with the women. Nevertheless, those who read his adventures would like him as a friend.
As punishment, the commands will transfer him to the snowy midst of Aosta, where the novels that gave him such notoriety are set. Meanwhile, in the stories in this volume, we meet him before the forced move. He knows he is about to say goodbye to his beloved city, but he does not know what his fate is. In this uncertainty, the past grips him on all sides sculpting his pessimism, feeding his melancholy.
He travels through Rome, familiar places, old acquaintances, while in his brash way he intuits unthought-of solutions to criminal enigmas. And these always have backgrounds of dark humanity. So much so that his flaws appear the other side, necessarily anti-rhetorical, of the medal of vivid pity for the derelicts and of the great pain that once tore at his heart. In short, he seems a kind of fallen angel.

What would happen if all major Italian publishing houses were grouped under one acronym? Giorgio Volpe is Italy’s greatest writer, a powerhouse in the field of letters. Upon delivery of his new novel Sull’orlo del precipizio he discovers that a string of investors has swallowed up his publishing house. Now in charge are caricatures in dark suits who hate metaphors and “love soaps if the public wants soaps.” Seeking an editorial escape route like a drowning man searches for air, Giorgio sinks into the grotesque and anguish of those who see their freedom of expression challenged. Antonio Manzini has written a ruthless and hilarious satire. A Fahrenheit 451-like dystopia, where it is the world of books that burns itself and not an external power.

Era of May kicks off three days after the events that conclude the previous novel, It’s Not the Season. For the investigation that opened there has not yet concluded. Then there is the most serious fact, the murder of Adele, a close friend of the deputy detective, killed by a killer while she was sleeping in Rocco’s bed. Forced to dig into his own past, the deputy commissioner will try to close the circle once and for all.

“Let the record show, Italo. On a night in May, at 1:10 a.m., Deputy Superintendent Rocco Schiavone gets a tenth-degree break!” The officers of the Aosta police station, who are learning to live with the thorny rind covering his wounded heart, joke with their boss’s ranking of breakups, at the top of which is always the case he is investigating. But Rocco is prostrate for real. A woman has died in his place, the girlfriend of a friend from Rome, “annoyed” by someone who wanted to hit him. And when he comes out of depression, he sets out on the trail of that murderer between Rome and Aosta, digging painfully into his own past in search of the motive for revenge, a journey through time that is like a wound opening on a sore that has not yet stopped bleeding. The ruptures have only begun, though: another corpse filed at first as a heart attack. Another journey that penetrates this time into the golden present of the city of the unsuspected.

In this fourth novel, Rocco Schiavone’s series of rough, realistic detective stories steeped in bitter irony continues.

But in reality, through the various adventures of a politically incorrect policeman, a single tale unfolds. The tale of the life of a man who clashes with the unpunished and pervasive corruption of social privilege, in the absolute disenchantment of today’s Italy. A character who is brutal because the tenderness that animates him would be weakness, incapable of love because he is full of total love for the one who is now only a ghost, cynical because dishonesty seems to have won. A character of such truth and depth that he seems to live a life of his own.