These Dark Things
Introducing the Captain Natalia Monte Series Set in Naples
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When a beautiful college student is found murdered in the catacombs beneath a monastary, Captain Natalia Monte of the Carabinieri is assigned to investigate. Could the killer be a professor the student had been sleeping with? A blind monk who loved her? Or perhaps a member of the brutal Napali criminal organization, the Camorra? As Natalia pursues her investigation, the crime families of Naples go to war over garbage-hauling contracts; and all across the city heaps of trash pile up, uncollected. When one of Natalia's childhood friends is caught up in the violence, her loyalties are tested, and each move she makes threatens her own life and the lives of those she loves.
“When Jan Merete Weiss's Captain Natalia Monte investigates the murder of a beautiful young university student, she must thread an uneasy path between childhood loyalties, religious superstition, corrupt officials, growing piles of garbage, and warring factions of an entrenched Camorra. Weiss has done her homework, walked the pestilent streets, prowled the catacombs below the city, and created a thoroughly human woman who will do what she must to protect her part of a city that both enchants and infuriates her.” —Margaret Maron, author of the Judge Deborah Knott series
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Capt. Natalia Monte of the Naples' carabinieri, the dedicated and scrupulously honest heroine of poet Weiss's absorbing fiction debut, must find who killed Teresa Steiner, a brilliant graduate student from Germany whose body, viciously stabbed, was discovered in an underground crypt. Natalia and her romantically inclined partner, Sgt. Pino Loriano, briskly interview a galaxy of intriguing and well-defined prime suspects: Teresa's lecherous thesis adviser, whom she rebuffed; a novice monk, also infatuated yet rejected; and Aldo Gambini, head of the local Camorra, which controls gambling, prostitution, garbage hauling and even the collecting of money from street shrines. Could Teresa, whose thesis centered on the study of street shrines, have been skimming donations? The corruption of the Neapolitan bureaucracy, mirrored by the stench from uncollected garbage in the streets, taints but cannot overcome the vitality of the city. Weiss renders its bustling trattorias and colorful neighborhoods with flair.
