Murder in Torregrande, the new novel by Matteo Manca

That Sardinia is a hotbed of crime writers (and of writing more generally) is no longer surprising, and the geographical map of narrative locations hosting crimes (often summer crimes, like the books that tell them) would be dense and interesting: from Gavino Zucca's Sassari-Alghero to Antonio Boggio's Carloforte, from Elias Mandreu and Carlo Augusto Melis Costa's Nùoro to Francesco Abate and Maria Francesca Chiappe's Cagliari.

“Omicidio a Torregrande” , the new novel by Matteo Manca published by Piemme, fits into this dense map, frequented among others by characters created by Eleonora Carta, Piergiorgio Pulixi, Flavio Soriga (and the late Giorgio Todde, who deserves a space and a memory of his own).

The facts: The smell of summer is already creeping into Torregrande when the body of sixteen-year-old Chiara De Angelis, daughter of a well-known doctor in Oristano, is found in the swimming pool of the Residenza della Luna. The novel begins with this image—a girl restored by the water. Inspector Diana Falchi and Deputy Inspector Federico Garau are in charge of the case. They are joined by Oreste Ginevra, a criminologist from Bologna with a prodigious memory and the inflexible rituals resulting from an autism spectrum disorder, a man who resembles John Lennon fallen into an Agatha Christie novel.

Diana receives him with hostility: behind her distrust lies a wound that the crime reopens. Meanwhile, Chiara's death overlaps with the disappearance of Elisa Colomo, a teacher at De Castro High School. Manca thus orchestrates a concerted investigation, planting false culprits and clues destined to change meaning.

The novel's most interesting core is the conflict between being and appearing. Nothing can be said without spoiling the pleasure of reading, giving the reader clues that would risk unbalancing the novel's fair play. However, it seems reasonable to consider how the detective story, in this case, also becomes a reflection on the ability to build certainties around prejudice: we don't see the facts, Manca seems to suggest, but often the history we're already willing to believe. The same is true of the protagonists' memories, which are capable of distorting the past to make it bearable.

Despite a few minor stumbles and a few captions, the novel possesses the pace, clarity, and strong local roots typical of Italian provincial thrillers : Torregrande, Oristano, and the Sinis region collectively compose a recognizable geography punctuated by dialect, music, food, and history. The couple Diana and Oreste thrive on the ability of opposites to attract each other: two opposing minds, one institutional and rigorous, with a deep wound that undermines her trust in the criminologist, and the other eccentric and deductive, forced to correct each other.

More than the name of the killer, what ultimately matters is the mechanism that protected him. So, if on the synthetic lawn of a villa in the Residenza della Luna, among the green tufts, a few yellowish ones emerge, we can't help but think, by similarity, that certain lies imitate reality even at the cost of revealing themselves grotesque. And that, ultimately, Matteo Manca's entire novel lies in that lawn.