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European Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature, Police Stories, Italian Fiction
The Damned Season by Lucarelli Carlo β€” book cover

The Damned Season

by Lucarelli Carlo, Michael Reynolds
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Overview


"A fresh and exciting new voice in Italian crime fiction. Keep the translations coming."-Booklist

It is 1946. De Luca suffers from insomnia and has lost his appetite. He's got problems with women and a case that he can't crack. In this second installment of the heralded De Luca trilogy, the Commissario is posing as a certain Giovanni Morandi to avoid reprisals for the role he played during the fascist dictatorship. Exposed by a member of the partisan police, De Luca is forced to investigate a series of brutal murders, becoming a reluctant player in Italy's postwar power struggle.

Synopsis


"A fresh and exciting new voice in Italian crime fiction. Keep the translations coming."-Booklist

It is 1946. De Luca suffers from insomnia and has lost his appetite. He's got problems with women and a case that he can't crack. In this second installment of the heralded De Luca trilogy, the Commissario is posing as a certain Giovanni Morandi to avoid reprisals for the role he played during the fascist dictatorship. Exposed by a member of the partisan police, De Luca is forced to investigate a series of brutal murders, becoming a reluctant player in Italy's postwar power struggle.

Publishers Weekly

Set in 1946, Lucarelli's taut middle volume of his De Luca trilogy (after Carte Blanche) finds Commissario De Luca, who was a police officer during the Mussolini regime, in a perilous position. Under an assumed name, De Luca is just trying to survive any way he can when a member of the Partisan Police catches him in the woods outside Ravenna and drags him into an investigation of a triple homicide. Despite his instincts for self-preservation, De Luca can't refrain from making observations that display his professional expertise. When he's seduced by the local strongman's girlfriend, De Luca finds himself further at risk. While many authors have written of the conflicts faced by honest police officers in Nazi Germany, few American readers will be familiar with the aftermath of WWII in Italy, and Lucarelli excels at portraying fear and suspicion in a country struggling to recover from its national trauma. (May)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

About the Author, Lucarelli Carlo

Carlo Lucarelli is one of Italy's best-loved crime writers. He teaches at Alessandro Baricco's Holden School in Turin and in Padova's maximum security prison. He conducts the program "Blue Night" on Italian network television, and his novels Almost Blue and Lupo Mannaro have both been made into films.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Set in 1946, Lucarelli's taut middle volume of his De Luca trilogy (after Carte Blanche) finds Commissario De Luca, who was a police officer during the Mussolini regime, in a perilous position. Under an assumed name, De Luca is just trying to survive any way he can when a member of the Partisan Police catches him in the woods outside Ravenna and drags him into an investigation of a triple homicide. Despite his instincts for self-preservation, De Luca can't refrain from making observations that display his professional expertise. When he's seduced by the local strongman's girlfriend, De Luca finds himself further at risk. While many authors have written of the conflicts faced by honest police officers in Nazi Germany, few American readers will be familiar with the aftermath of WWII in Italy, and Lucarelli excels at portraying fear and suspicion in a country struggling to recover from its national trauma. (May)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Crusty Commissario De Luca gets drawn into a murder investigation in spite of himself. Traveling incognito to Rome in 1946, Milan detective De Luca is accosted by enthusiastic Ravenna police chief Leonardi, ostensibly because he looks so out of place. Despite brand-new papers that identify him as Giovanni Morandi of Bologna, De Luca is shuttled by Leonardi to the scene of a recent bloody crime, a house where an entire family was bludgeoned to death. Leonardi stops short of blowing De Luca's cover, but he tells a nostalgic story about once seeing the inspiring Milan inspector De Luca at work. After Leonardi dubs De Luca "Engineer"-as good a tag for him as any other, he declares-the unlikely duo sets out to investigate. Part of De Luca's low profile stems from a fear of reprisals for his involvement with Italy's recently deposed dictatorship. Still, at his core, the sleuth is a sleuth and can't resist trying to unravel the crime. On his initial visit, he points out subtle anomalies in the crime scene. The interaction between the eager acolyte and the erratic but brilliant mentor forms the heart of the novel, with De Luca's excessive drinking and his affair with lusty local innkeeper Francesca providing unforeseen hurdles. The middle entry in Lucarelli's early trilogy (Carte Blanche, 2006, etc.) peppers crime fiction with sharp irony and provocative moral ambiguity.

Book Details

Published
May 1, 2007
Publisher
Penguin Group (USA)
Pages
128
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9781933372273

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