Death and the Olive Grove
Book Two
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
April 1964, but spring hasn't quite sprung. The bad weather seems suited to nothing but bad news. And bad news is coming to the police station.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Vichi's compelling follow-up to Death in August (2012), set in 1964, the odd and diminutive informer Casimiro comes to Florence and tells a strange story to his friend Inspector Bordelli: he has found a dead body in Fiesole, near a closely guarded villa that belongs to a mysterious foreigner. The doubtful but dutiful Bordelli fails to find evidence of Casimiro's claim, but when more than one little girl turns up dead and mutilated, the inspector thinks that the informer may have stumbled across something sinister that implicates someone from Bordelli's past. As the investigation proceeds and the inspector deals gently with the grief-stricken mothers of the victims, it becomes clear that the evil of the Nazis casts a long shadow and that Bordelli has his own scars and secrets from WWII. The author's smooth style, believable characters, and astute recognition of the multiple layers involved in a crime engage the reader throughout.
Customer Reviews
Promising but disappointing
The second of two books in this series that I’ve read, and the fatigue is setting in. The story is adequately interesting, but the writing is weak: repetitive ideas and scenes and sentences, and frankly implausible situations.
A significant percentage of the scene descriptions are of Bordelli smoking at all hours, or being up all night, or going to the office instead of going home. Beyond this tiresome repetition, there is no subtlety or plot waist to intrigue the reader, or anything to set the story beyond the average bulk crime fiction. So much more could have been done with the. City and the crimes to make the books worthwhile.
An editor is mentioned in the acknowledgments but it is hard to believe that there was any editing at all.
Two of these books is enough and even at $0.99 I won’t wade through another.
For good crime stories set in Italy, go to Donna Leon and don’t waste time or money here.