A Man's Blessing

(Translated from the Italian by Adrienne Foulke)

JACKET NOTES:  The anonymous letter arrived in the afternoon mail. The message, spelled out in words that had been cut from a newspaper, read: "This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done, you will die."
The pharmacist Manno, to whom the letter had been addressed, showed the letter to the mailman. "It may be a joke, you think?" the pharmacist asked the mailman anxiously.
"What else can it be? A joke. Don't give it a second thought," said the postman, and went away.
Then, on August 23, 1964, the pharmacist and his friend Dr. Roscio went hunting, as they'd done often. When some of their dogs came running back to the village alone, a search party set out. The hunters were found in the woods, dead: the pharmacist had been shot in the back, the doctor in the chest.
The colonel and the chief inspector of the squadra mobile hurriedly took over the investigation. The pharmacist's friends ransacked his past for clues and bestowed all sympathy on Dr. Roscio's lovely young widow.
But it was Professor Laurana, quiet, modest, timid, who began to move toward the truth, along a dangerous path -for in the Sicilian world truth is complicated indeed and, for an unworldly man, perhaps too realistic-and too ruthless.
This is a brief and brilliant novel which lights up the dark Sicilian landscape with extraordinary clarity.
(© Harper & Row)