Blackest winter

Human history has never been straightforward. If anything, it’s more of an arabesque. With whorls and twirls representing discord and conflicts. Often signifying pain. Here we have three strange murders for Commissioner De Luca, the protagonist of Carlo Lucarelli’s first novels, who is back on the trail in L’inverno più nero, published by Einaudi. It is the winter of 1944 and we are in Bologna, a city that, before giving in to a night of darkness and fear, appears as “a filthy, putrid kasbah, bursting with voices, roaring sullenly like a train in a tunnel, people swarming, each in search something – snow, butter, a cigarette, just one last moment to overcome what for everyone, ever since the beginning of the war, perhaps since ever, was the toughest and coldest winter”. The deaths that De Luca is investigating are those of a university professor, a German soldier, and a benign engineer who has been battered to death. Nothing is what it appears to be and the truth seems to be a bargaining chip for yet more violence or frantic survival. Lucarelli again shows that he is a master storyteller, mixing the genres of crime drama, historical novel, and social fresco.   L’inverno più nero Carlo Lucarelli Einaudi, 2019