Carte Blanche, The Damned Season, Via delle Oche
Carlo Lucarelli, Michael Reynolds (translator)
Europa Editions ISBN: 978-1609451189
Pub. date: June 2012
368 pages
Size: 5.25x8.25
Price: $18.00
In the late eighties, while working on his thesis on the history of law enforcement during the Fascist period in Italy, Carlo Lucarelli interviewed a man who had been an officer in the Italian police force forty years. He had started as a member of the Fascist political police, then, towards the end of WWII, when the Fascists were on the run, he answered to partisan formations then in control of the country. His job? To investigate the Fascist hierarchy, his former employers. After the war, when regular elections were held and a government formed, he was employed by the Italian Republic. Part of his job was again to investigate and arrest his former employers, this time the partisans. Carlo Lucarelli never finished his thesis. Instead, Commissario De Luca was born, and his creator became one of Italy’s best-loved crime authors overnight.
Here, for the first time, the entire De Luca trilogy is gathered in one omnibus edition.
Carte Blanche
April, 1945. The final frenetic days of the Salò Republic. A brutal murder on the good side of town lands Commissioner De Luca in the middle of a hornet’s nest where the rich and powerful mix drugs, sex, money, and murder.
The Damned Season
Commissario De Luca is on the run under an assumed identity to avoid reprisals for the role he played during the Fascist dictatorship. Blackmailed by a member of the partisan police, De Luca must investigate a series of murders, becoming a reluctant player in Italy’s post-war power struggle.
Via delle Oche – WINNER of the Scerbanenco Prize
Italy, 1948. The country’s fate is soon to be decided in bitterly contested national elections. A man has been found dead in a brothel at the heart of Bologna’s notorious red light district. De Luca is unwilling to look the other way when evidence in the murder points to local politicians and members of the Bologna police force.
