Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone

By Maurizio de Giovanni

A kidnapped child and the burglary of a high-class apartment: two crimes that seem to have no connection at all until Inspector Lojacono, known as "The Chinaman," starts to investigate.
 
De Giovanni is one of the most dexterous and successful writers of crime fiction currently working in Europe. His award-winning and bestselling novels, all set in Naples, offer a brilliant vision of the criminal underworld and the police that battle it in Europa's most fabled, atmospheric, dangerous, and lustful city.
 
The Bastards of Pizzofalcone is a new series set in contemporary Naples that draws inspiration from Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels and features a large cast of complicated cops doing battle with ruthless criminals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Release date: Aug 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781609453398

Maurizio de Giovanni

Maurizio de Giovanni's Commissario Ricciardi books are bestsellers across Europe, having sold well over one million copies. De Giovanni is also the author of the contemporary Neapolitan thriller, The Crocodile (Europa, 2013), and the new contemporary Neapolitan series The Bastards of Pizzofalcone."" He lives in Naples with his family.""

Reviews for Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone

[juliestielstra · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Competent follow-up to the first two (Crocodile and Bastards of Pizzofalcone). A little boy, grandson to an obscenely wealthy loan shark, is kidnapped; his divorced parents are at each other's throats. Another couple - not divorced but who also loathe each other - reports a very fishy apartment burglary. And a listless, miserable, lonely old woman appears to be the next target of an angel of death, believed by one of the team to be murdering such sufferers to relieve them of their burdensome lives. The team peels off to pursue these disparate challenges, while they all try to deal with their private demons. This is where some of De Giovanni's "tricks" are starting to irritate. Virtually every female character (and they are almost all "beautiful") is sexualized with repeated descriptions of their breasts, their "derrieres," the lines of their bodies. This includes a not-totally convincing pair of lesbian women, who seem to suffer spasms of horniness that just have a very male sensibility. De Giovanni also seems to like to torment children - two out of the three books I've read in the series have this as a central focus. Which feels icky, including a weird, apropos-of-nothing-else scene of child sexual abuse - and from a writer who in other pages waxes nearly hysterical about how children are the be-all, the end-all, the only thing in the universe worth having. It's kind of creepy. So, maybe I'll try the next one, but hope for better - or at least different - things.