February 9, 2015
Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone, the urbane but unlikable protagonist of Manzini’s English-language debut, has been exiled to the town of Aosta in the Alps after a dustup with his superiors in Rome. As casually arrogant as any Manhattanite forced to endure time away from N.Y.C., he hates the cold and the provincials. What keeps him going is investigating crime, and he’s delighted to learn that a body, impossibly mangled, has been discovered by a man grooming a mountain after the day’s skiing is done. Schiavone searches for the murderer among a large cast of suspects, all familiar to one another in the small community and many of them related. An inspired sleuth, he’s also short-tempered, abusive, and mildly corrupt. The largely comic tone is at odds with the case’s gruesome, grisly reality, but many readers will enjoy the unfamiliar Alpine setting and the generally engaging plot.
February 15, 2015
Manzini's first English translation presents an irascible policeman who'd rather be back among the fleshpots of his beloved Rome than clambering over a piste in an Alpine resort collecting evidence in a snowy murder case.The mangled corpse that tears Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone from the side of his mistress, Nora, is identifiable only by a tattoo that matches that of the dead man's wife and business partner, Luisa Pec. Leone Micchiche, the husband who never came home the night before, had been married barely a year, but already he and Luisa had big plans. They ran Belle Cuneaz, a successful mountainside bar and trattoria that catered to the tourist trade. Leone wanted to sell some properties he held jointly with his brother Domenico in order to raise further working capital. Luisa had recently discovered that she was pregnant. All that ended when someone shoved a handkerchief into Leone's mouth, covered him in snow and abandoned him to his fate, which as it turned out was to be run over by a snowcat operator whose machine tore the body to pieces. Rocco's interest in whodunit is dwarfed by his interest in arranging with his old friend Sebastiano Cecchetti to skim his cut from a marijuana shipment they plan to confiscate, or purchasing appropriate shoes for his unwelcome new case, or making time with the attractive clerk who sells him the shoes, or getting reassigned to Rome at the first opportunity, or joining his long-suffering wife, Marina, in dreaming about Rome in the meantime-though his interests in the Eternal City are clearly different from hers. The suspects are thin as onionskin, and the culprit might have been plucked from a hat. But Rocco's detective chops are as authentic as his crabbiness and his matter-of-fact corruption, and the denouement at Leone's funeral has to set some kind of record for calculated bad taste.
Starred review from April 1, 2015
With his Clark's desert boots and his Roman ways, Deputy Prefect of Police Rocco Schiavone is a fish out of water in the Alpine town of Aosta, where he has been transferred for disciplinary reasons. Contemptuous of his new home and its reserved citizens, the brusque detective comes alive when a mangled corpse is found on one of the pistes above the ski resort of Champuloc. Working to identify the body and find the killer, Rocco deals with incompetent underlings and petty superiors, grills meek postmasters and arrogant ski instructors, and beds the local women who find him alluring in spite of his crankiness. VERDICT The mystery here is almost beside the point; what keeps the reader glued to the story is Rocco. He's fascinating in his contradictions--sarcastic yet haunted, undaunted in his pursuit of justice yet also slightly underhanded in his methods. Fans of Andrea Camilleri's Sicily-set "Inspector Montalbano" series will enjoy this debut mystery for its sly humor, vividly drawn characters, and amusing cultural clashes between rugged mountaineers and the more urbane southerner. [See "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/15.--Ed.]--Wilda Williams, Library Journal
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