BLACK MESSIAH

A line of cypress trees picking out the soft hillside, swallows on the rooftops of villages in golden stone: the timeless Tuscany of old masters. But a series of murders has spilled blood over this picture postcard spring, and everyone immediately asks: Is the Monster of Florence back? More than thirty years have passed since the killings that horrified the region between 1968 and 1985. The presumed offender, an ageing peasant, died long ago. Was there some mistake back then? Has someone decided to continue the macabre work of this killer who so deserved his name, inspiring novels and films, including the famous Silence of the Lambs? Jacopo D’Orto, a Carabinieri captain nearing retirement, leads the enquiry. He soon comes across Miles Lemoine, an enigmatic American professor who has come to work in Florence. The day his seventeen-year-old daughter disappears, all of Miles’s old demons come back to haunt him. Who is he really? Is Jacopo right to suspect him? In order to understand, the Carabinieri captain takes some risks and digs up the ditch where a sludge of Italian mysteries has accumulated. He knows that ever since the Renaissance, evil has buried itself underground then resurfaced to feed on the world before burying itself again, sated. Until the next time. Present-day Italy seems to have been purified of these secrets. What if behind outward appearances there was chaos, violence and power struggles?
  
Italian born Simonetta Greggio writes in French and lives in Paris and the South of France. Her best known titles published by Stock include La douceur des hommes (2005), Dolce Vita 1959-1979 (2010), L’homme qui aimait ma femme (2012) and Les nouveaux monstres (2014).