Rencor

Hector Perazzo, a former inspector of the Argentine Federal Police based in Turin, is a private detective who survives on routine jobs: cuckolds, cheating husbands, schoolboys who spend more than they should.... But when the Peruvian Doña Pilar asks him to investigate the disappearance of her daughter Linda, a twenty-year-old who vanished into the emptiness of an apparently shadowless life, the scenario changes completely. Hector probes the marginal environments of multi-ethnic Turin, entering and leaving the gray zone that in every metropolis blurs the boundaries between legality and illegality. And so it is that the search for the young South American girl reveals an unforeseen dark side. The investigation will trace the contours of a strange and terrible reality that will lead Hector to the mountains of Saluzzo, in the footsteps of a great Renaissance painter. Giorgio Ballario, one of the most celebrated authors of recent Italian crime novels, here displays his usual mastery in leading the reader through a labyrinth as absorbing as it is disturbing. Halfway between the pen of Raymond Chandler and Paolo Conte, Perazzo is a memorable character, ironic and fatalistic, cynical and nostalgic (as only an expatriate porteño can be), misogynistic but seductive. It is impossible not to be fascinated by the rhythm of his investigation: the irresistible, indolent restlessness of the tango broken by peaks of action and suspense worthy of the great American authors. And it may be true that Turin is not Buenos Aires, but, page after page, the reader will discover that it is the ideal city to host a great contemporary noir.