All the nuances of the word justice

Davide Longo is a sagacious narrator, skilled in alternating the dark, almost claustrophobic tones of the events that narrate the subtle irony that characterizes the two protagonists of his noir novels, Inspector Vincenzo Arcadipane and former Inspector Corso Bramard. Their saga, which began in 2014 and has now reached its fifth chapter, sees them move among the intrigues and cruel mysteries of contemporary Turin. Arcadipane increasingly disenchanted, bordering on disillusionment, Bramard capable of intuitions closed to most, despite his life having been marked by tragedies that have changed him irreversibly.

In the last novel of the series, “Provincial Requiem” (Einaudi, 2023, pp. 496, also e-book) we find the two protagonists at the beginning of their partnership . It's 1987, Corso Bramard is still police commissioner and Vincenzo Arcadipane is his right-hand man. Inspector Arcapidipane almost every night recovers his superior, destroyed after the murder of his wife and daughter, in the taverns to put him back on his feet and make sure that he shows up at the police station the next morning. Although in this period his mind was often clouded by alcohol, no one would think of doing without Bramard's acumen, especially at the moment in which a burning file materializes on the tables of the police station: a manager of a large industrial group is in coma with a bullet in the head. Someone with his face covered by a balaclava shot him in cold blood on the landing of his house. The victim is Eric Delarue , just over fifty years old, of French origins, handsome, histrionic, successful, married to a rich woman: partly to mock him, partly out of envy, the workers of the factory of which he was responsible they called him Julio, like the Spanish singer Julio Iglesias whose irresistible smile he possesses. His wounding puts the entire province into turmoil because someone being shot in such cold blood is not something that often happens in the mists of Turin.

Who could hate so much as to shoot Delarue on his doorstep? The claim of a terrorist group arrives and many in the police station are convinced that they have closed the case. Bramard, however, does not agree and begins to investigate in his own way... thinking in silence, asking apparently bizarre questions, weaving connections that only he can then transform into a logical pattern.

Accompanied by his trusty Arcadipane, he will thus find himself moving through the mysteries of the provincial world where the event occurred and the too many silences of upper-class Turin, where vices and malice are unspeakable sins, even if well known to many.

A truly complex case, that of Delarue's wounding, the solution of which will lead Bramard and Arcadipane to deal with all the nuances of the word justice and will lead the two protagonists to make choices which they will then be unable to escape for the rest of their lives. .