Cocaine

Description

In Carlotto's The Campagna Trail, Inspector Campagna uses an old friendship with notorious drug dealer Roby Pizzo in a Machiavellian attempt to keep the peace. But when an interfering new police chief demands Campagna bring down the Mafioso who heads Pizzo's gang, Campagna must use every weapon he has to save his job and his life. Meanwhile in Carofiglio's The Speed of an Angel, a writer in crisis strikes up an unlikely friendship with a mysterious woman he meets in a quiet seaside cafe. As their conversations deepen, and their obsessions darken, their drug-fuelled relationship begins to spiral, in this haunting tale of damnation and redemption. Finally in De Cataldo's The White Powder Dance, the city police are put on the trail of a baby-faced new graduate in the Milanese banking sector. As the pursuit accelerates through back streets and skyscrapers, it becomes clear that there is more to organised crime than getting your hands dirty.

Massimo Carlotto was born in Padova in 1956. At the age of 19 he was arrested on suspicion of murdering a female student, a crime for which he was only acquitted after eighteen years, eleven trials, one successful escape attempt and finally a Presidential Pardon. Gianrico Carofiglio was born in Bari in 1961. A former anti-Mafia judge, he is the author of eight novels, including The Past is a Foreign Country, for which he won the Premio Bancarella. Giancarlo De Cataldo is an Italian magistrate turned crime writer. He is the editor of Crimini, The Bitter Lemon book of Italian Crime Fiction.

A new voice, and one with which I am sure we will soon become familiar is that of Gianrico Carofiglio - Daily Mail Carlotto provides a machine-gun pace, a jaundiced eye for political corruption and a refreshing absence of anything approaching a moral vision - Kirkus Reviews De Cataldo is immediately associated with 2002's Romanzo Criminale (Crime Novel), a book which did much to change the face of crime-writing in this country. That remarkable work has become the pole star by which every contemporary Italian writer of noir now steers his ship, the sort of book that every one of them hopes to write - The Rap Sheet