Daughter of Ashes
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Set in the idyllic mountains of Northern Italy, the latest volume in Ilaria Tuti’s gripping series is a tour de force, a poignant and irresistible story about the relentless pull of the past on the present.
Superintendent Teresa Battaglia, a trail-blazing criminal detective on the Italian police force, is on sick leave, recovering from her recent brush with death in pursuit of a killer. But none of her colleagues, not even her partner, know that her Alzheimer’s is getting worse, and that Teresa is unsure she will ever return to work.
Teresa’s plans for retirement are shelved, however, when she is urgently summoned to meet with menacing serial killer Giacomo Mainardi. Refusing to speak with anyone but Teresa, whose investigative work twenty-seven years prior landed him in maximum security prison, Mainardi has disconcerting news: somebody is after him, and only Teresa holds the key to keeping everyone, including herself, safe. To solve the case, Teresa must come face to face with a history she thought she’d buried, back to when Giacomo first began to kill, and Teresa—newly pregnant and married to an abusive man—did everything she could to catch him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tuti's splendidly constructed fourth adventure for Italian Police Supt. Teresa Battaglia (after 2022's The Sleeping Nymph) explores the criminal profiler's past, its impact on her career, and its connection to a current case. Now in her 60s, Teresa is entering the early stages of Alzheimer's, a fact she has yet to admit to her colleagues. She's on sick leave, recovering after she and her partner nearly died while pursuing a killer and determining how to handle the onset of her condition, when DA Albert Lona—an old foe—orders her to interview Giacomo Mainardi, a serial killer she brought to justice 27 years earlier. After his recent escape from maximum security prison in northeastern Italy, Mainardi has turned himself in and asked to speak privately with Teresa. He tells her that, during his brief bout of freedom, he fulfilled a request to kill a man, but he will not reveal who hired him, who the victim was, or where the body is buried. Teresa's efforts to fill in the missing pieces of Mainardi's confession are interspersed with flashbacks to the pair's initial cat-and-mouse game decades earlier, allowing Tuti to add depth and drama to Teresa's characterization without sacrificing thrills. The result is a standout entry in a superior series.
