Persona Non Grata

Description:  In a seedy apartment in a northern Italian city, 11-year-old Laura Vardin has been brutally stabbed by an unknown assailant. A woman living near the barracks claims that she has been raped. Is there a sex maniac at large in the city? Commissario Trotti, still addicted to boiled sweets and pretty women, sets out to investigate.

Progress is hampered by the discovery of an abandoned baby on the banks of the Po and by the fact that everyone seems to be lying, and also by the fact that Trotti's department has had enough of his sour perfectionism. Trotti, too, is haunted by the past: the murder, forty years ago. of his brother Italo by the Fascists, or was it in fact by the Partisans? Now news reaches him from his old village in the hills that six more murders have been committed. Is the motive connected with a huge hoard of Nazi treasure, missing since his brother's demise?

Persona Non Grata is a fast-paced. complex and exciting thriller, the third to involve Commissario Trotti.
(©Victor Gollancz Ltd.)