Via delle Oche (De Luca Trilogy, Book 3) [Paperback]

Carlo Lucarelli (Author), Michael Reynolds (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2008

It is 1948. Italy’s fate is soon to be decided in bitterly contested national elections. A man has been found dead in via delle Oche, at the center of Bologna’s notorious red light district. Commissario De Luca is unwilling to look the other way when evidence in the man’s death points to local politicians and members of the Bologna police force. The brutal worlds of crime and politics conspire once again, and in this third and final book in the De Luca trilogy, winner of both the Italian Mystery Award and the Scerbanenco Prize, violence, power, and sex combine to create an atmosphere that becomes more volatile as the trilogy reaches its shocking finale.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The final volume in Lucarelli’s De Luca trilogy finds the Italian policeman back on the force, this time in Bologna in 1948. Political reprisals are still the order of the day, as the postwar climate remains tumultuous. De Luca is trying to stay under the radar, his past employment with Mussolini’s secret police likely to derail his career at any moment. Self-preservation dictates that he stay away from a hot-potato case involving the suicide (or murder) of a gofer at one of Bologna’s licensed brothels, but De Luca can’t resist the temptation to follow the clues wherever they lead, which, inevitably, is straight toward a political scandal. Set in the days prior to a contentious general election pitting Communists against right-wing Christian Democrats, the novel may prove difficult to follow for those not familiar with postwar Italian politics, but the general milieu—a cop trying to do his job but running afoul of departmental turf-builders—will strike home with anyone who has watched The Wire (or even just worked in any kind of office). Give this to fans of Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen novels. --Bill Ott

Review

Praise for the De Luca trilogy

“While the police work in Carte Blanche is smart and suspenseful, the most striking feature is Lucarelli’s textured depiction of life in a society where power is shifting from murderous oppressors to the seething oppressed.” —The Washington Post

“Lucarelli skillfully forces us to view De Luca’s twisted world from the policeman’s own skewed perspective.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Carte Blanche is one of 2006’s top ten crime novels.”—The Chicago Tribune

“Lucarelli proves that the dark and sinister are better evoked when one opts for unadulterated grit and grime . . . Carte Blanche is classic noir, a slim, taut, stylish volume that unfolds in the midst of political upheaval.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

“This second novel in the De Luca trilogy (after Carte Blanche), told by Lucarelli in spare, flat prose, is emotionally wrenching and aesthetically satisfying.” —Library Journal (highly recommended)

“The Damned Season: a war-boiled jewel of 2006.”—The Austin Chronicle

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Europa Editions (June 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933372532
• ISBN-13: 978-1933372532
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #409,607 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fitting end to the De Luca trilogy, January 25, 2009

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Via delle Oche (De Luca Trilogy, Book 3) (Paperback)

Police Commisario (Inspector) De Luca is one of those cops who would like nothing more than to be left along to do his job. He doesn't care much for politics on a global or national scale and doesn't really want to play the sort of political games that could facilitate a cop's climb up the career ladder. But De Luca lives in a turbulent place (Bologna, Italy) during turbulent times (WWII and its immediate aftermath) and the fact that De Luca wants no part of politics does not mean that politics and intrigue won't plague him as he goes about his business. The result has been a trilogy of books that have provided entertaining police stories while at the same time painting a pretty detailed picture of what life may have been like in post-war northern Italy.

"Via Delle Oche" is the final volume in what has come to be known as "The De Luca Trilogy". The trilogy is set in northern Italy and takes us from the closing days of WWII, (Carte Blanche (De Luca Trilogy 1)) to the turbulent years immediately after the war (The Damned Season (De Luca Trilogy 2)) until 1948, the current volume, where a critical post-war national election is at hand. The cold war is raging in Europe and the election is thought to be a critical battlefield. Consequently, the Church, the powerful Italian Communist Party, and various secular partisan political groups engage in the sort of intrigue that would make Machiavelli proud. This election is of no immediate professional consequence for De Luca since he is now, upon his return to Bologna from `exile' in Damned Season, assigned to the vice squad. De Luca doesn't seem to mind the demotion all that much as it keeps him outside the political battles that effect the police force as much as any other Italian institution. But the fates and a murder in a bordello on the Via Delle Oche conspire to put De Luca back where he least wants to be: in the limelight walking a political tightrope.

The strength of "Via Delle Oche" lies in Lucarelli's ability to paint a pretty realistic-feeling portrait of postwar northern Italy in the years immediately after WWII. I got a real sense of time and place while reading these books. Apart from De Luca, Lucarelli does not invest a lot of time in presenting us with a full-blown character analysis of the key parties to the crime and its aftermath. We also don't get a lot of the internal life of De Luca but De Luca's actions tend to speak for themselves and over the course of the books I got a nice feel for his personality without having had Lucarelli spell it out for me.

Although the stories themselves are self-contained I think that the De Luca Trilogy needs to be read in sequence. By the time I came to "Via Delle Oche" the character of Commisario De Luca has been fully formed and the reader will miss out on a lot of context if they have not read the first two volumes. I enjoyed all three books.

All in all Via Delle Oche was a filling end to the De Luca trilogy. Recommended. L. Fleisig

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Post war Italy, July 18, 2008

By 

Albert A. Chambers "Russian Front diletante" (Cincinnati, OH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Via delle Oche (De Luca Trilogy, Book 3) (Paperback)

This is a well written snapshot of the struggle in post war Italy between the communists, the church and secular moderates and right wing.
Very little character development goes on. I would recommend this to Italophiles. As a mystery it is ok not great.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Post-WW II political wrangling in Italy, July 26, 2008

By 

Blue in Washington "Barry Ballow" (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Via delle Oche (De Luca Trilogy, Book 3) (Paperback)

Carlo Lucarelli taps into the deep well of Italian cynicism for this continuing saga of Commissario De Luca, the last honest cop in the country, as the parties of the Left and Right duke it out in an apparently meaningless contest for power. Against that political backdrop, Lucarelli spins a credible murder mystery that centers on the "honest prostitutes" working the city of Bologna.

Italy in 1948 was a tough neighborhood for anyone trying to get on with a normal life after many years of the Fascist regime and five years of the war. Lucarelli is terrific at giving the reader a realistic look at the environment of the time.

"Via Delle Oche" is the third book in this series now in translation and print by Europa Editions. "Carte Blanche" and "The Damned Season" chronicle earlier adventures of the indefatigable Commissario De Luca and are well worth reading.