Forced into service as an unwilling errand boy for an organized crime syndicate, Giorgio Pellegrini must find a way to shake off the mob and return to his peaceful life as a successful and honest businessman.

The tenth Commissario Ricciardi Neapolitan mystery is "endlessly surprising… a delicate balancing act between love and pain, horror and beauty."-ThrillerNord Christmas has just passed and the city is preparing to celebrate New Year when, on the stage of a variety show, famous actor Michelangelo Gelmi fires a gun at his wife, Fedora Marra. The shooting itself would be nothing strange: it is repeated every evening as part of their performance....

The Bastards of Pizzofalcone Series In the fifth installment in Maurizio de Giovanni's bestselling series, the Bastards of Pizzofalcone face their hardest challenge yet: will they emerge stronger or will they succumb to Naples's darkest forces? Sometimes it takes facing a formidable adversary to truly know one's worth. The Bastards of Pizzofalcone may have found just that: when the brutal murder of a baker rattles the city, they are ready to investigate....

The novel about hard-living teenagers in poverty-stricken postwar Rome, by the renowned Italian filmmaker. Set during the post-World War II years in the Rome of the borgate-outlying neighborhoods beset by poverty and deprivation-The Street Kids tells the story of a group of adolescents belonging to the urban underclass. Living hand-to-mouth, Riccetto and his friends eke out an existence doing odd jobs, committing petty crimes, and prostituting themselves....

Massimo Carlotto has been described as "the reigning king of Mediterranean noir" (Boston Phoenix), "more noir than even the toughest American noir" (Josh Bazell, author of Beat the Reaper), "about as gritty as they come" (The New York Times), and "the best living Italian crime writer" (Il Manifesto). Now, he gives his American readers his most memorable character yet: ex-con turned private investigator Marco Buratti, a.k.a...

Something has got Aurel Timescu's attention: an unsolved and apparently unsolvable crime. A vacationer has been found hanged. And it is a crime that will go unpunished if Aurel isn't ready for the fight of his life. Aurel Timescu's French is tinged with a Romanian accent, he has the disheveled air of a character from between the wars, and a past as a performer in piano bars. Nobody can quite understand how he got to be Consul. Now, he's taken a position...

A woman has gone missing. Her husband, too ashamed to admit to the police that he and his wife were part of a ring of sexual adventurers that organized sadomasochistic orgies, turns instead to the Alligator. Marco Burrati enters a depraved demiworld where ferocious deviates prey upon lonely victims. But the savagery of this world is only the first surprise this investigation holds in store for the Alligator. Encountering such violence and desperation...

The Midnight Choir teems with moral dilemmas, and Dublin emerges as a city of ambiguity: a newly-scrubbed face hiding a criminal culture of terrible variety. Small-time criminals have become millionaire businessmen, the poor are still struggling to survive, and the police face a world where the old rules no longer apply.

Whoever the lambdas might be, and wherever they really come from, they're already here among us. Outwardly alien arrivals from a distant sea, the lambdas are genetically human. The government has noticed them. So has a whole gamut of extremist groups. Cara Gray has noticed them too, first as a haunting presence in her otherwise ordinary childhood, then as the impossibly shifting target of her work as a police officer. When a bomb goes off at a...

Following her mother's untimely and unexplained drowning, which was preceded by a series of strange phone calls, forty-five-year-old Delia leaves Rome and embarks on a voyage of discovery through the beguiling yet often hostile streets of her native Naples. She is searching for the truth about her family and the men in her mother's life, past and present, including an abusive husband. What she discovers will be more unsettling than she imagines, but...