Bitter Remedy (37 page)

When it comes to murder it’s all in a name.

When Magistrate Matteo Arconti’s namesake, an insurance man from Milan, is found dead outside the court buildings in Piazzale Clodio, it’s a coded warning to the authorities – a clear message of defiance and intimidation.

Commissioner Alec Blume, all too familiar with Rome’s criminal underclass, knows little of the Calabrian mafia currently under investigation by the magistrate. Handing control of the investigation to now live-in and not-so-secret partner Caterina Mattiola, Blume takes a back seat. But while Caterina questions the Milanese widow, Blume has an underhand idea of his own to lure the arrogant mafioso out of his hiding place...

‘Exquisitely written in a quietly elegant style, and dotted with nuggets of coal black humour’
Irish Times

The Memory Key

On a freezing November night Commissioner Alec Blume is called to the scene of a shooting. 
 
The victim is Sofia Fontana, the sole witness to a previous killing. Blume’s enquiries lead from a professor with a passion for the art of memory to a hospitalised ex-terrorist whose injuries have left her mind innocently blank; from present day Rome’s criminal underclass, to a murderous train station bombing in central Italy several decades ago. 
 
Against the advice of his bosses and his own better judgement, Blume is drawn ever deeper into the case, which looks set to derail his troubled relationship with Caterina...

‘The American-born Blume is an engaging hero who might just have the potential to fill the gap when Michael Dibdin’s death ended his Italian detective Aurelio Zen’s investigations’

Sunday Times

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First published in Great Britain 2014

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2014 by Conor Fitzgerald

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ISBN 9781408853467

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