KILL THE KING

Italian mysterian Dazieri concludes a trilogy of dark mayhem with a suitably gruesome close.

If Kill the Father (2017) gave us a would-be paterfamilias with whom only Hannibal Lecter would want to exchange Christmas cards and Kill the Angel (2018) introduced readers to the arcana of Indo-European mythology, this concluding volume is a study in PTSD. And for good reason: Colomba Caselli, the enterprising detective heroine, has had just about all she can stand of mass murder, decapitation, and other hallmarks of her trade, and she’s taken herself to the Italian countryside to rest. It’s quiet—too quiet, since the area is full of little towns “inhabited only by old people who rounded out their pensions by hunting for truffles.” Yet even there trouble has a way of finding Colomba, in this case in the form of an apparently autistic young man she finds wandering about dazed, covered in blood that is not his own. The lad, she learns, “is perfectly capable of understanding and formulating intent,” which makes him a fine candidate for imprisonment. It would be nice if Dante Torre, Colomba’s partner in crime-solving, were on hand to figure out what’s happened in the quaint confines of Montenigro, but he’s been imprisoned in a “six-story building the size of a public housing block without a single fucking window on the upper floors”—and on the outskirts of Chernobyl, no less. This is no cozy English countryside whodunit: The doings that are afoot are nasty and exceedingly lethal, with a mad truck driver, for instance, mowing down rows of priests and assorted other victims until the festivities come to an end in a huge explosion “slicing like an incandescent scythe through the crowd of running people.” That’s just a taste of the ugliness that people wage on one another throughout the book, which is decidedly not for sensitive souls.

Fans of Larsson and Nesbø will hope that Dazieri changes his mind and extends the Torre/Caselli series.