Antonio Manzini is an actor, a screenwriter, a director, and the author of two murder mysteries featuring Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone. Black Run is the first of these novels to be translated into English. He lives in Italy.
Adam's Rib (Rocco Schiavone Series #2)
Paperback
$14.99
- ISBN-13: 9780062354679
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication date: 08/02/2016
- Series: Rocco Schiavone Series , #2
- Pages: 320
- Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)
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From the bestselling author of Black Run comes Antonio Manzini’s mesmerizing second mystery novel featuring detective Rocco Schiavone.
Six months after being exiled from his beloved Rome, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone has settled into a routine in the cold, quiet, chronically backward alpine town of Aosta: an espresso at home, breakfast in the piazza, and a morning joint in his office.
A little self-medication helps Rocco deal with the morons that almost exclusively comprise the local force. Especially on a day like today. It’s his girlfriend’s birthday (if you could call her that; in his mind, Rocco’s only faithful to his late wife), he has no gift—and he’s about to stumble upon a corpse.
It begins when a maid reports a burglary in Aosta. But there’s no sign of forced entry, and after Rocco picks the lock, he notices something off about the carefully ransacked rooms. That’s when he finds the body: a woman, the maid’s employer, left hanging after a grisly suicide. Or is it? Rocco’s intuition tells him the scene has been staged. In other words, it’s murder—a pain in the ass of the highest order.
In this stylish international mystery, Antonio Manzini further establishes Rocco Schiavone as one of the most acerbic, complicated, and entertaining antiheroes crime fiction has seen in years.
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Publishers Weekly
05/30/2016Manzini’s entertaining second mystery set in Aosta in northwest Italy (after 2015’s Black Run) finds Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone still discontent living in the sleepy Alpine town, where he was transferred from his beloved native Rome as punishment for getting on a powerful government official’s wrong side. When Rocco responds to a report of burglars barricaded inside an apartment, he discovers it’s been ransacked—and a woman’s body is dangling from a lamp hook. He soon pegs this apparent suicide as murder. Rocco uncovers clues, sabotages his liaison with a local woman, and refuses to give up his desert boots for footwear that would be more appropriate for Aosta’s snow-laden streets. In the process, he struggles to control his anger and sadness (with the aid of a daily breakfast-time joint), does not suffer fools gladly, tries to do what is just, and exhibits a sharp sense of irony. Readers will look forward to seeing more of this fascinating and complex character. (Aug.)
Booklist
Manzini delivers a wonderful mix of in-depth characterization with an ever-deepening plot. Best of all, perhaps, are his descriptions (his evocation of the sounds an espresso machine makes is just one example) and his characters’ wide-ranging comments on Italian life and politics.Espresso
Argumentative, bad-tempered, liable to work around official procedure in order to attain his objectives, Schiavone has a puzzle to unravel and a number of his own personal mysteries to reveal to us.Venerdì di Repubblica
Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. More than once I thought I’d spotted the killer, but I was always wrong.Kirkus Reviews
2016-05-17Still smarting from the assault on a rapist that got him banished from Rome to pokey Val d'Aosta, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone goes after whomever killed a local lady and tried to make her death look like suicide.And it certainly does look like suicide when Belarusian cleaner Irina Olgova lets herself into her regular employers' home and discovers Esther Baudo hanging from the ceiling of her husband's den. Patrizio Baudo, sales rep for athletic equipment, returns home from his morning exercise to find himself a widower. But his grief turns to rage when a casual observation by Schiavone indicates that his wife's suicide was really homicide. For a time it seems that the deputy police chief, who's constantly correcting the people who call him "Commissario," will have little time for the case, since he's preoccupied with finding an acceptable birthday gift for Nora Tardioli, his pushy mistress, and keeping tabs on Giorgio Ansaldo, who's resumed raping young women, including the niece of an old friend of Schiavone's, back in Rome, and fretting about how many pairs of desert boots he's worn out since his exile to Aosta. But he uses an effective combination of logic and brute force to prove who stole a brooch of Esther Baudo's right around the time of her death, and at length he brings the case to a solution out of Agatha Christie as satisfying as it is unexpected here.It's hard to believe the ingenuity behind the central mystery, which seems routine until the denouement. But Schiavone (Black Run, 2015) continues to make a memorable companion in crime.