Judges

Description

Camilleri, best known for his Inspector Montalbano series, presents the charming Judge Surra who moves to a small Sicilian town in the late nineteenth century. He does not quite understand the quirky welcoming gifts from the locals, but nothing stands in the way of his quest for justice - and pastries. Lucarelli brings us a far darker story. Judge Valentina Lorenzi - La Bambina - is so young and inexperienced she hardly merits a bodyguard. But when she barely survives an assassin's bullet, her black-and-white world of crime and punishment turns a deathly shade of grey. In The Triple Dream of the Prosecutor, De Cataldo, a judge himself, crafts a Kafkaesque tale of a lifelong feud between Prosecutor Mandati and the corrupt Mayor of Novere. When the mayor narrowly escapes a series of bizarre assassination attempts, Mandati begins to realise that all his dreams may just be coming true. From Italy's premiere crime authors, three novellas from every tradition of crime writing.

Andrea Camilleri is one of Italy's best-loved and most successful authors. The Potter's Field was the winner of the 2012 International Dagger. Carlo Lucarelli was co-founder of the 'Gruppo 13' writers' collective, and now teaches at Alessandro Baricco's Holden School in Turin, as well as at Padova's maximum-security prison. Giancarlo De Cataldo is an Italian magistrate turned crime writer. He is the editor of Crimini, the Bitter Lemon book of Italian Crime Fiction.

Each story covers a similar theme but are all very different in approach and time-frame and the high standard does make you wish that more of Lucarelli's and De Cataldo's books were available in English. All three authors have recently had tv series shown in the UK: Montalbano, Inspector De Luca and Romanzo Criminale, so one can hope - Eurocrime A delightful blend of the serious and the comic. The protagonist is a version of the holy fool, always one step ahead of the villains without (apparently) realising it. - CWA Judges' comments on Judge Surra