Description:  What Van der Valk has been to Holland. and Maigret to France. Commissario Trotti could well become for northern Italy. This is no run-of-the-mill thriller: it is a tightly plotted and tautly written novel which takes us most convincingly into a corrupt and devious Italian society. a society in which the banks, the church, the masons, the lawyers, and of course the politicians, are all of them suspect, on the take, ready to go to any lengths to advance their own ends. Only the police seem to be tolerably honest, and they are split several ways by departmental rivalries and jealousies. Milan. Brescia. the Po valley, the lakes--Timothy Williams gives all his settings a vivid sense of place. And Trotti. with his more or less estranged wife (who is now in the United States, working for a pharmaceutical company), his deeply disturbed daughter Pioppi, an earlier sweetheart Donatella, who returns briefly into his life, his friend and colleague. Magagna, whom he has failed--these and even the minor characters are given a sharp edge.

The story opens with Trotti's return, for a little break, to his holiday home, on the shore of Lake Garda. He is breakfasting at a café when gunmen drive up and shoot the man at the next table. Is it perhaps Trotti himself they have tried to kill? He can't be sure. The case falls under the jurisdiction of the local Carabinieri and their detective branch, the Nucleo Investigativo, but Commissario Trotti intends to make his own investigation... The narrative twists and turns through a maze of half-truths, deception and intrigue as Trotti struggles towards the truth.
(©Victor Gollancz Ltd.)