Solea

Publishers Weekly

In Izzo's taut concluding volume to his memorable Marseilles trilogy (after 2006's Chourmo), former cop Fabio Montale is still struggling to find a purpose in the wake of his leaving the police force. Despite his pessimism, Montale allows himself to hope again after he falls hard for a woman named Sonia he meets in a bar; noir fans will be less than surprised that the flicker of romantic promise is quickly extinguished-in this case by a Mafia hit man targeting Montale and people he cares for to get him to divulge the location of his journalist friend, Babette, who's written an exposé detailing mob links with politicians and the police. Babette's sophisticated analysis of organized crime's effect on the working classes, plus Izzo's unsparing treatment of his cynical hero, elevate this far above most Mafia-themed fiction. (June)

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Kirkus Reviews

The final installment of Izzo's Marseilles trilogy plunges ex-cop Fabio Montale into an even deeper well of corruption than the first two (Total Chaos, 2005; Chourmo, 2006). In the two years since she left Marseilles for Italy, investigative reporter Babette Bellini has been compiling information for a series of articles that will reveal the monstrous extent of organized crime's reach into European governments and their allegedly clean economies. Now that she's finally ready to publish, the Mafia is on her trail-and, once she mails a package of computer disks to her old friend and sometime lover Fabio, on his as well. The anonymous phone caller's threat couldn't be plainer: "We're going to kill your friends, Montale. All of them. One by one. Until you find the Bellini woman." Since they've already begun by cutting the throat of Sonia De Luca, who'd come on to Fabio only the night before, they have to be taken seriously. But so does Helene Pessayre, the police captain who demands to know Babette's whereabouts so that she can protect her. So does Babette, who has plans of her own. And so does the rising chorus of the dead, as Fabio begins to lose the few friends he has left in Marseilles to the ruthless executioners. A story like this can't possibly end well. But poetry-spouting Fabio goes out in a blaze of glory that makes the trilogy's capstone its least nihilistic entry.