Annibale Canessa didn’t want to go back to his old life. When everything went wrong in 1984, he traded his brutal, exciting career in the Carabinieri for paradise in San Fruttuoso. He started swimming in the bay at dawn and helping his elderly aunt run a small restaurant. His life was calm.
But some shattering news pulls him back in - his estranged brother has been found dead; lying beside him, the body of an ex-terrorist, a man Canessa himself caught. Back in Milan, Canessa must pursue old connections and unsolved crimes, which draw him ever deeper into the underworld he thought he’d left behind…
Loved it!
I am really getting into crime /detective / thriller / noir fiction set outside of the standard locations of the UK and USA. And this one by Perrone is no exception to the great books I have been reading.
The synopsis covers it all: retired cop returns to avenge the killing of his estranged brother and work out the link with acts of terrorism from thirty years previous, and hence the back and forth with the timeline.
We are introduced to a number of characters early on, and it is only as we slowly progress, does their relevance to the narrative become apparent (I kept a list to keep track!). Many of these are not nice folks - and that is the aim of the author, I think, to provide varying shades of good and bad (and some downright evil), with which to demonstrate the blurred lines and vagaries of what is right and what is just. Even Canessa himself reminds me of "Dirty Harry" - a no-nonsense, ultimately good guy, who believes that if you shake the tree hard enough, the rotten fruit will eventually fall.
As I mentioned, I loved it. For me, it had all the required elements: crime, mystery, history, passion, power, corruption, secrets, revenge, intriguing characters, action, resolution.
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