LAW FIVE

An Italian referee is thrown into the center of a corruption scandal in Disco’s debut thriller.

Milo Sant’Elia is a referee for an Italian professional football—that is, soccer—league. It’s not an easy job: He must stay as fit as the players while also performing under the gaze of the sport’s unforgiving fans: “At the highest level, when a player makes a mistake, the fans forgive them after the next touch of the ball,” explains Milo’s brother, Dino, one of the book’s narrators. “But when a referee makes a mistake, it’s inexcusable—the abuse can follow an official for the rest of their career.” However, Milo is understandably horrified when he receives a package at his home in Palermo containing an amputated human thumb—a clear message of intimidation. Milo suspects it has to do with an upcoming high-stakes match, and he refuses to go to the local police until he identifies the culprits with the help of Dino and their attorney friend, Sansone; the ref specifically fears that the Referees’ Association may have been compromised. He attempts to referee games as usual, but he quickly finds his career, and his life, under threat; a mobster, who’s part-owner of a football team, had a referee killed in a game-fixing scheme—and Milo thinks he’s next. The novel is formatted like an oral history, with multiple characters recounting memories. This epistolary style gives the book a somewhat antiquated feel, but it doesn’t hamper the story’s pacing. Disco’s prose captures a convincing conversational tone, as when Dino and Milo drive to the airport: “Milo’s car was a furnace. The engine rumbled steadily behind us….We drove with the windows down, and I don’t know how, but sitting in that heat gave me chills.” Milo is a particularly intriguing character—an aging referee and bookstore employee who lives by a rigorous code of conduct and also likes to rock out to Austrian heavy metal. The various narrative voices are distinctive, and the transitions between them add a sense of momentum to the narrative. The novel is relatively brief, and the pages mostly fly by, keeping readers pleasantly engrossed.

A lean and enjoyable crime novel set in the sports world.