The first volume in Scerbanenco’s Milano Quartet is a blast from the past, a sleek, stripped-down reminder of the fast,...
A disgraced doctor’s ticket to redemption requires him to rescue a young man even more lost than he is in this slice of noir first served in Italy in 1966 and finally translated into English.
After helping a dying patient into the great beyond, Duca Lamberti was struck off the medical register and sentenced to three years in prison. But he didn’t lose all his friends, and now one of them, Milan’s Superintendent Luigi Carrua, has set him up with a new job upon his release. The assignment seems simple: to wean celebrated engineer Pietro Auseri’s son Davide, 22, from the bottle. But Duca immediately sees that normal therapies won’t keep the troubled young man sober for long, and a suicide attempt the first night Duca’s on the job tells him that Davide’s carrying a heavier burden than alcoholism. It’s not long before the boy reveals his terrible secret: He failed to prevent the death of shop assistant Alberta Radelli a year ago, after she hitched a ride with him and they impulsively drove to the countryside and made love. Although Alberta begged this intimate stranger to take her away instantly, that very day, he drove her back toward Milan instead and dropped her at the side of the road, and there she was found, her wrists slit, the following day. Luckily for Davide, Duca, reviewing the evidence surrounding the case, realizes that Alberta’s death was no suicide, and he identifies the best possible therapy for what ails Davide: solving her murder.
The first volume in Scerbanenco’s Milano Quartet is a blast from the past, a sleek, stripped-down reminder of the fast, brutal days of Continental noir. Sensitive souls will notice that the author’s attitude toward the LGBT community has dated in more glaring ways.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61219-335-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Trenton's most unlikely bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum, is looking for Kenny Mancuso, who jumped bail after shooting his onetime friend Moogey Bues in the knee. And she's been hired to do a little work on the side for creepy, marriage-minded undertaker Spiro Stiva, who's missing two dozen empty caskets. But instead of getting on Mancuso's tail, Stephanie (One for the Money, 1994) finds Mancuso on hers—he's sending her body parts excised from Stiva's deceased clients, taunting her in their face-to-face meetings, and going after her irrepressible Grandma Mazur with an ice pick—and by the time she locates the caskets, they're about to be set afire. Meantie, somebody has returned to Moogey Bues's gas station to shoot him dead, and Joe Morelli, the swivel-hipped stallion of Trenton Vice who's always had the hots for Stephanie, has tied both Mancuso and Moogey's equally menacing colleague Perry Sandeman into a big-time theft of government arms. But how can Stephanie ever fit the pieces of the puzzle together when her cockeyed burg puts her hamster under constant threat of death, and her manicurist tells her, "I used to carry a forty-five, but I got bursitis from the weight"? The first must-read of the new year: more action and laughs than two weeks in Trenton.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-19638-7
Page Count: 301
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
A tragicomic salute to both the recuperative powers of its has-been hero and the remarkable career of its nonpareil author.
Now that he’s revisited and deepened the tissue of double-crosses that put him on the map with George Smiley, le Carré (A Legacy of Spies, 2017, etc.), evergreen at 87, turns to an equally hapless new hero in the age of Trump and Brexit.
“I’m a field man,” says Nat, a Secret Intelligence Service agent, “not a desk jockey, not a social carer.” Convinced at 47 that his years running spies throughout Europe are over, he accepts one last assignment as the only alternative to being put out to pasture for good: assuming command of Haven, the London substation he describes to his unenthusiastic wife, human rights lawyer Prudence, as “a Mickey Mouse outfit” where his job will be “either to get it on its feet or speed it on its way to the graveyard.” No sooner has Nat sunk into this forgettable ambit than three disquieting developments arise. Florence, a probationer who’s his nominal second-in-command, angrily quits over the unexplained cancellation of a project she’s designed, spearheaded, and pitched to the powers that be. Sergei Kusnetsev, a Russian defector who’s become a sleeper agent for Her Majesty’s Government, is contacted by Anastasia, a Russian agent who presumably either wants to put him to work, if she trusts him, or to expose him, if she doesn’t. And Ed Shannon, the much-younger researcher who joined Nat’s athletic club in order to play badminton with him and vent about the folly of Brexit and the rise of neo-Nazism in the States, suddenly appears in an alarming new role. Seeing the world as he knows it—not the new world order or the special relationship, but his own faded patch of it—threatened from every corner, Nat, determined to assert himself one last time, hatches a rickety plan to keep the pot from boiling over.
A tragicomic salute to both the recuperative powers of its has-been hero and the remarkable career of its nonpareil author.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7887-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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