“Era di maggio” kicks off three days after the events that conclude the previous novel, “Non è stagione”. For the investigation that opened there has not yet concluded. Then there is the most serious fact, the murder of Adele, a close friend of the Deputy Police Chief, killed by a killer while she was sleeping in Rocco's bed. Forced to dig into his own past, Rocco Schiavone will try to close the circle once and for all.

"Let the record show, Italo. On a night in May, at 1:10 a.m., Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone gets a tenth-degree break!" The officers at the Aosta police station, who are learning to live with the thorny rind covering his wounded heart, joke with their boss's ranking of breakups, at the top of which is always the case he is investigating. But Rocco is prostrate for real. A woman has died in his place, the girlfriend of a friend from Rome, "annoyed" by someone who wanted to hit him. And when he comes out of depression, he sets out on the trail of that murderer between Rome and Aosta, digging painfully into his own past in search of the motive for revenge, a journey through time that is like a wound opening on a sore that has not yet stopped bleeding. The ruptures have only begun, though: another corpse filed at first as a heart attack. Another journey that penetrates this time into the golden present of the city of the unsuspected. In this fourth novel, Rocco Schiavone's series of rough, realistic detective stories steeped in bitter irony continues. But in reality, through the various adventures of a politically incorrect policeman, a single tale unfolds. The tale of the life of a man who clashes with the unpunished and pervasive corruption of social privilege, in the absolute disenchantment of today's Italy. A character who is brutal because the tenderness that animates him would be weakness, incapable of love because he is full of total love for the one who is now only a ghost, cynical because dishonesty seems to have won. A character of such truth and depth that he seems to live a life of his own.