Adam's Rib

May 30, 2016
Manzini’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.

June 1, 2016
Still 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.

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May 1, 2016
Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone has been demoted from the police force in his native Rome for beating up a rape suspect. He's been reassigned to the town of Aosta in the Italian Alps. Schiavone is cut off from Rome, from his friends, and, most grievously, from his beloved, murdered wife. His goal, as he puts it, is just to keep taking one step, another step, the mantra of the Italian soldiers who marched through the frozen Ukraine in 1943. In the second in this series (following Black Run, 2015), Schiavone's lethargy is interrupted by a maid's discovery of her female employer hanging from a light fixture. The scene and the condition of the woman's body make Schiavone believe this is not, as was first believed, a suicide but rather a carefully staged murder. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)