Full list >

Latest reviews

In 1929, a year before his classic The Maltese Falcon was published, Dashiell Hammett began his debut novel Red Harvest with these two lines: “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his...

— Jan 25 2010

Massimo Carolotto is a leading Italian crime writer, known in the English speaking world for crime novels and semi-fictional narratives about his own experience as a fugitive from the Italian justice system. Marco Videtta is a well-known Italian screenwriter. They've collaborated...

— Dec 15 2009

Italian business, politics and gangsterism make for a potent stew, one in which reality long ago outstripped the fictional imagination. Massimo Carlotto has made a career of stories ripped from Italian headlines and thinly rewritten as fiction. This is noir with a vengeance,...

— Dec 12 2009

Francesco Visentin, lawyer and scion of one of northeast Italy’s most powerful families, is broken by the news that his fiancée has been murdered days before their wedding. As the investigation begins and Francesco is cleared of the crime, it becomes clear that the man who...

— Oct 28 2009

The first line of Dashiell Hammett's 1929 hard-boiled masterpiece Red Harvest refers to a fictional town as "Poisonville," the moniker used by residents to acknowledge its endemic corruption. The Poisonville of Italian novelist Massimo Carlotto's latest crime allegory...

— Sep 24 2009

Northeast Italy’s industrial pollution provides the backdrop for Carlotto (The Goodbye Kiss) and screenwriter Videtta’s outstanding fable of greed, corruption and moral abandonment. Filled with echoes of Dante’s Inferno, the book centers on the murder of Giovanna Barovier,...

— Sep 1 2009