Three, Imperfect Number
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A blind woman leads her Naples police colleagues through the darkness in this distinctive crime thriller.
A report has landed on Commissario Martusciello's desk. The lifeless body of the singer Jerry Vialdi—aka Gennaro Mangiavento—has been found at the Naples football stadium; another corpse, this one a Jane Doe, has been discovered in the Bentegodi Stadium in Verona, hundreds of miles away.
The bodies were left in a fetal position and there are no signs of physical violence: The method and the madness behind it appear to hide some unutterable secret. Conclusion: a daring challenge left by a psychopath for the police—who are stabbing in the dark with no idea where to begin. All except for superintendent Blanca Occhiuzzi: Beautiful, blind from birth, forced by the dark that envelops her to perceive the world through only four senses, she feels the fear in people; she feels their guilt and their innocence. It is she who takes Martusciello by the hand, guiding him into the mind of a murderer . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Melbourne PI John Dorn declares, in the prologue of Australian author Lovitt's powerful hard-boiled debut, "You don't make promises to do what I do." He goes on to do just that over the course of 10 chapters, each involving a separate case. The cases get progressively more disturbing, both in terms of their subject matter, which include gruesome torture, and their impact on Dorn, a classic world-weary narrator ("I was parked in a narrow, forgotten kind of alley that's really an abyss between tall buildings, where it's still raining 20 minutes after it's stopped everywhere else"). The title refers to a kind of promise, according to Dorn's mother, "made to get what you wanted, not one you actually ever kept." For Dorn, the promise is that his crime stories not be about him, and it takes until the very end for the reader to assess what he wanted in making it.
