The Second Day of the Renaissance
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Timothy Williams was selected by The Observer as one of the “10 Best Modern European Crime Writers” for his series featuring Northern Italian police detective Piero Trotti. Now, 20 years after his last investigation, Trotti returns!
After decades as a police detective in his Northern Italian hometown on the River Po, Commissario Piero Trotti has retired. But retirement brings him no respite. An old friend calls him to Siena to give him urgent news: a notorious hit man has returned to Italy to kill Trotti. The former inspector isn’t surprised to learn of the vendetta against him; Trotti has plenty of skeletons in his closet. His mistaken accusations and failed gambles have cost innocent lives in the course of his investigations. Though Trotti carries the burden of these deaths with him each day, now someone else has appeared to enact his own, long-awaited retribution.
Traveling across Italy to escape his pursuer, Trotti revisits his own past and searches for clues to the cold-case murder of Valerio Gracchi, a leftist radical who became a national media sensation. But even the right answers may not save Trotti and his loved ones.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fans of Williams's series set in Northern Italy will welcome the sixth appearance of Commissario Piero Trotti, last seen in 1996's Big Italy. Now 68 and retired, Trotti is traveling by train from Padania to Rome when he meets a 21-year-old American woman, Wilma Barclay, whose father has disappeared. Trotti later stops off in Siena, where an old acquaintance in the Carabinieri warns him that a professional killer, Enzo Beltoni, is after him. While trying to stay one step ahead of his pursuer, Trotti becomes immersed in the life, loves, and unsolved 1988 murder of Valerio Gracchi, who was a member of a liberal political movement, Lotta Continua, and had ties to Beltoni. Eventually, a connection emerges between Wilma's missing father and the Gracchi case. Readers of this cerebral, melancholy tale will hope to see more of the conflicted Trotti, a man heavy with regret, who, when confronted with the possibility of death, fervently wishes for it, yet also desires to live.
