Young beasts

“History is not, after all, / the devastating bulldozer that is said / to leave underpasses, crypts, holes, and hiding places”, wrote Eugenio Montale. But it is precisely in these crypts, these hiding places, that the investigator protagonists of Davide Longo’s Le bestie giovani, Einaudi, find themselves. They start from the discovery of a mass grave on the outskirts of Turin with the remains of a dozen people and, through their intuition and intelligence, they immediately dismiss the simplistic explanation given by a team specialised in Second World War crimes, who maintain that they are the corpses of fascists or partisans. Old stories... Who knows? Inspector Arcadipane, a small, awkward, restless and melancholy but also very clear-headed man, is not at all convinced. He secretly takes the tibia of one of the corpses and involves Corso Bramard, his mentor in the police force, and the shrewd, short-tempered agent Isa Mancini in the investigation. And then... There can be no spoilers when reviewing a detective novel, of course. It is nevertheless worth saying that, once again, here we have a work by Longo in which a carefully crafted plot is combined with powerfully portrayed characters, great knowledge and a passionate desire to shed light on the dark recesses of Italian history, starting with the terrorism of the 1970s and the in-fighting between spies and “deviant” state organisations. The result is a great novel, effectively written, which one is sorry to finish and which whets one’s appetite for more. Le bestie giovani Davide Longo Einaudi, 2021