In the shadow of the "Monster of Florence," a serial murderer who has terrorized Italy for seventeen years, Laura Grimaldi sets her tense psychological thriller Suspicion—a noir mystery of a city transformed by fear, and of friendships and family ties twisted by uncertainty and dark speculation. Grimaldi, whose hardboiled mysteries of the 1950s earned her the title "Italy’s queen of crime," turns here to the deeper, more elusive and disturbing questions that haunt human affairs.
For years Matilde, the widow of a prominent Florentine doctor, has lived alone with her eccentric middle-aged son, Enea. When the police pay a call, the balance between mother and son is shifted just subtly enough to make Matilde prey to suspicions and doubts that grow ever more corrosive, ever harder to conceal and more dangerous to reveal. In the literary tradition of such mystery writers as Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell, Grimaldi creates an atmosphere charged with suspense as the daily lives and routines of her characters, infected with suspicion, begin to rearrange themselves around a few frightening facts and infinite monstrous possibilities.
Matilde’s efforts to decipher Enea’s secretive movements and occupations appear perfectly sensible and defensible through Grimaldi’s deft shifts between mother and son—and another, chillingly detached perspective on the gruesome murders. Grimaldi’s readers will find themselves as subject to misinterpretation and doubt, to sympathies and suspicions as her Florentine characters, and spellbound until the book’s final page.
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From the Publisher
Terrace Books, a trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
Wisconsin edition for sale only in North America & U.S. dependencies
From the Back Cover
"A tortured walk through the winding streets and twisted minds of modern Florence and Florentines. . . . leaves its readers . . . enlightened about crime fiction in a different culture by gluing its reader to the edge of the confessional couch."-Ray Browne, former. book review editor, Clues
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
suspicion,
This review is from: Suspicion: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a psychological 'noir' set in Florence.
Florence, for many years, was the true setting of some gruesome murders. Murders of young couples, with amputated bodily parts: women bodily parts only. The search for the killer went on for years and at some point, it peaked towards a conspiracy theory. The novel, I believe, has recreated some of the tension which existed in reality in Florence and the narrative gives the reader a fluent and erudite insight into Motherhood protectiveness and denial of admission of guilt: it is said that "behind a serial killer there is a mother figure". True? Perhaps, I do not know, but the intent of the novel to try and unravel this theory is clear. Scent, colours and, what I describe as the 'bohemian renascent' of Florence and Tuscany is clear and almost tangible. Doncarlo
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not very good,
By
This review is from: Suspicion: A Novel (Hardcover)
The cover flap creates the impression Laura Grimaldi is an acclaimed Italian writer, but I found this book boring. An elderly widow suspects her live-at-home son, who is bright but weird and stricken with diabetes, may be the serial murderer terrorizing Florence. And the son is hooked on a young drug addict, why we never understand. Maybe some fault in the mother-son relationship? The mother broods, the son broods, while the druggie strips his wallet.
The book is not well written. Over-indulgence on the murderer's gore, perhaps a feeble effort to add suspense where it's lacking, too many adverbs, mostly a dull narration and even duller dialogue. And not much of the color, mystery or glory of Florence. A predictable ending, too. Robin Pickering-Iazzi, a professor at UW-Milwaukee took the time to translate this clunker. I'm wondering why.
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