Il passato è un morto senza cadavere
When he is called out on a mountain road, Rocco Schiavone needs only a glance to realize that he is faced with a break on the tenth level of his very personal ranking. A cyclist, in fact, has been the victim of an accident. The dead man's name is Paolo Sanna, a 50-year-old man who has lived in the area for some time but whom apparently no one knows. Initial investigations immediately reveal some oddities. Sanna was affluent if not wealthy, but without employment, over time he had periodically changed residences throughout northern Italy, sporadic and superficial friendships, a few love affairs without consequences, distant and little-visited relatives: in short, “a kind of ectoplasm on the fringes of society.” To complicate matters, there is the rebus of the notebook found in his home, a list of names, acronyms and indecipherable numbers. The picture is one of a man on the run. But a long, endless escape, were it not for that bump in the mountains. To see it through, one must look into the past, going as deep as possible, a past that plunges Aosta's detective into the youthful years of a close-knit little group. Rocco would like to proceed as usual, heavy as a fist and subtle as a stiletto, but it is subtlety that he needs above all, even as he becomes increasingly dramatic about the unexplained disappearance of a person, a woman, to whom something intense binds him.
In this new adventure of Rocco Schiavone, Antonio Manzini raises the level of reflection on the human condition, in an investigation dense with traces, figures and details, eventful, rigorously logical, stirring shadows and desires, provoking light and turmoil, stirring courage and fear.