To Each His Own

This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done you will die. But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. The next day he and his hunting companion are both dead.The police investigation is inconclusive. However, a modest high school teacher with a literary bent has noticed a clue that, he believes, will allow him to trace the killer. Patiently, methodically, he begins to untangle a web of erotic intrigue and political calculation. But the results of his amateur sleuthing are unexpected—and tragic. To Each His Own is one of the masterworks of the great Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia—a gripping and unconventional detective story that is also an anatomy of a society founded on secrets, lies, collusion, and violence.

The Sicilian master Leonardo Sciascia, widely acknowledged to be one of the outstanding figures of twentieth-century Italian literature, was the first novelist to venture freely into the closed world of the Mafia. To American readers, however, he remains a little-known secret. New York Review Books will reissue two of his major works. Here Sciascia presents a brilliant anatomy of a society based on secrets and lies, collusion and violence, as a death threat, a double murder, and a curiously complacent police force prompt a schoolteacher to pursue a private investigation—with consequences at once ironic and tragic.

New York Times Book Review

[Sciascia] develops a particular kind of detective fiction where no culprit is ever found and apprehended, where no light can ever be shed, and where intrigues and corruption pervade society.