Conor Fitzgerald Libri

'An inspired creation', 'An engaging hero', 'The most popular detective of the coming decade' - Alec Blume is back

There's no cure for murder. Commissario Alec Blume, on health leave and fleeing his partner Caterina, has retreated from Rome to central Italy. At the Villa Romanelli he enrolls on a natural remedies course conducted by a young woman named Silvana. But far from recuperating or resolving his differences with Caterina, a feverish Blume becomes isolated and sluggish with sickness. Increasingly ill-at-ease in the stifling environment, the dark history of the crumbling villa and its once-magnificent gardens draws him in. And when a Romanian girl who works for Silvana's ambiguous fiancé Niki asks for his help, Blume finds himself dragged into the shadowy case of a missing girl, and the secret horrors of the garden's malign beauty.

An engrossing novel of murder, organized crime, and politics in contemporary Italy-the first in a series of Italian crime novels by a promising new writer.

On a freezing November night Commissioner Alec Blume is called to the scene of a shooting. The victim is Sofia Fontana, the sole witness to a previous killing. Blume's enquiries lead from a professor with a passion for the art of memory to a hospitalised ex-terrorist whose injuries have left her mind innocently blank; from present day Rome's criminal underclass, to a murderous train station bombing in central Italy several decades ago. Against the advice of his bosses and his own better judgement, Blume is drawn ever deeper into the case, which looks set to derail his troubled relationship with Caterina...