The cold summer

In the summer of 1992, two real-life anti-Mafia prosecutors and their companions were assassinated in a pair of car bombings by the Sicilian Mafia, as Carofiglio (The Silence of the Wave) notes in a brief introduction to this fine police procedural. To the alarm of Marshal Pietro Fenoglio, a Carabinieri officer based in Bari, the Mafia wars have spread that same year from Sicily to Italy's Puglia region. In particular, Fenoglio investigates the case of Damiano Grimaldi, a son of Nicola Grimaldi, the head of one of the warring factions, who was kidnapped on his way to school. Despite his parents paying a ransom, the boy's body is discovered three days later down a well. Nicola vows revenge on his enemy Vito Lopez, who immediately surrenders to the police. Lopez is debriefed, confessing to a whole range of crimes, including murder, but swears that he didn't take the child. In a number of long but fascinating interrogation scenes, Fenoglio gets closer to the truth. This standalone is sure to win Carofiglio, a former prosecutor who specialized in organized crime, a wider U.S. audience. (Sept.) Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly.

The summer of 1992 had been exceptionally cold in southern Italy. But that’s not why it is remembered. That summer ushered in a spate of killings by the Mafia of judges and police officers, most of them assassinated near Palermo. The Sicilian killings and ensuing gang wars also infected the Bari region in Puglia, triggering an investigation by local Carabinieri officer Pietro Fenoglio, the hero of Carofiglio’s latest novel.

The summer of 1992 had been exceptionally cold in southern Italy. But that’s not the reason why it is still remembered.

On May 23, 1992, a roadside explosion killed the Palermo judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police officers. A few weeks later judge Paolo Borsellino and five police officers were killed in the center of Palermo. These anti-mafia judges became heroes but the violence spread to the region of Bari in Puglia, where we meet a new, memorable character, Maresciallo Pietro Fenoglio, an officer of the Italian Carabinieri.

Fenoglio, recently abandoned by his wife, must simultaneously deal with his personal crisis and the new gang wars raging around Bari. The police are stymied until a gang member, accused of killing a child, decides to collaborate, revealing the inner workings and the rules governing organised crime in the area.

The story is narrated through the actual testimony of the informant, a trope reminiscent of verbatim theatre which Carofiglio, an ex-anti-mafia judge himself, uses to great effect. The gangs are stopped but the mystery of the boy’s murder must still be solved, leading Fenoglio into a world of deep moral ambiguity, where the prosecutors are hard to distinguish from the prosecuted.