Maurizio De Giovanni

Blood Curse: the Springtime of Commissario Ricciardi Maurizio De Giovanni

Publisher Marketing: Ricciardi has visions. He sees and hears the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths. It is both a gift and a curse. It has helped him become one of the most acute and successful homicide detectives in the Naples police force. But all that horror and suffering has hollowed him out emotionally: He drinks and doesn t sleep. Other than his loyal partner Brigadier Maione he has no friends. Naples, 1931. In a working-class apartment in the Sanita neighborhood, an elderly woman by the name of Carmela Calise has been beaten to death. When Ricciardi and Maione arrive at the scene they start asking the neighbors questions. No one wants to talk, but slowly a few interesting facts slip out. Carmela Calise was moonlighting as a fortune-teller and moneylender. In her decrepit apartment, she would receive clients among them some of the city s rich and powerful predicting their futures in such a way as to manipulate and deceive. If economic ruin lurked in their futures, Calise was happy to help for a price, of course. She had many enemies: those indebted to her, manipulated by her lies, disappointed by her prophesies, or destroyed by her machinations. Murder suspects in this atmospheric thriller abound, and Commissario Ricciardi, one of the most original and intriguing investigators in contemporary crime fiction, will have his work cut out for him." Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 06/03/2013 (EAN 9781609451134, Paperback) Library Journal 10/15/2013 pg. 90 (EAN 9781609451134, Paperback) Contributor Bio:  De Giovanni, Maurizio Maurizio de Giovanni lives and works in Naples. In 2005 he won a writing competition for unpublished authors with a short story set in the 1930s about Commissario Ricciardi, which was then turned into the first novel of a series. His books have been successfully translated into French, Spanish, and German and are now available in English. Contributor Bio:  Gardner, Grover Grover Gardner has narrated over 650 audiobooks, been named one of the Best Voices of the Century by "AudioFile" magazine, and has received over twenty "AudioFile" Earphones Awards, as well as two coveted Audie Awards.