Kill the Angel

September 1, 2017

The author of 50 screenplays and numerous European best sellers, Dazieri showed up here in 2016 with the well-reviewed Kill the Father, starring Roman deputy police commissioner Colomba Caselli and private consultant Dante Torre. Now they're contending with a train carriage full of dead bodies, and Torre isn't inclined to blame Islamic extremists.

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December 4, 2017
Chapter one of Dazieri’s disappointing sequel to 2017’s well-received Kill the Father opens with an arresting sentence: “Death arrived in Rome at ten minutes to midnight aboard a high-speed train from Milan.” Colomba Caselli, deputy chief of the city’s homicide squad, is called to Termini Station after a grim discovery—all the passengers in the train’s first-class car are dead, victims of a bioweapon. Colomba joins a massive manhunt for the men claiming responsibility in the name of ISIS. Her skepticism that ISIS is behind the attack is bolstered by insights from private consultant Dante Torre. The reader, however, is ahead of the leads, due to a grim prologue featuring prisoners confined to a concrete cube, including a 13-year-old referred to as “the Girl,” who survives torture only to get the upper hand on their captors. Genre veterans will be wondering when this teaser will bear fruit, and when it does, the payoff isn’t particularly interesting. Hopefully, Dazieri will return to form next time. Agent: Laura Grandi, Grandi e Associati (Italy).

December 15, 2017
More murder, mayhem, and madness, Italian-style.Dazieri's Kill the Father (2017) introduced two psychically wounded characters, Dante Torre and Colomba Caselli, who wrestle with various demons while solving extremely nasty crimes. In this follow-up, the opening gambit is a very nasty crime indeed, with a whole train car full of victims--and that car is the first-class compartment of the Milan-to-Rome express, exciting visions of the class struggle. Of one victim, Dazieri writes by way of warming up to the subject, "the officer decided that this was the deadest dead person he'd ever laid eyes on." Leave it to a book with a lead named Dante to impose degrees of deadness, but whatever the case, suspicion immediately falls on the usual suspects--the Muslims, that is. A few raids on mosques and one exploding head later, Dante divines that maybe the Islamic State group isn't to blame after all; for her part, the already well-traumatized Colomba is put on leave, giving her and Dante the freedom of the highway. What they discover while trundling back and forth to Germany, Austria, and elsewhere is that the real killer is Giltine, an avenging angel of sorts, a woman engineered to a fine point of psychosis, with the fingerprints of Stasi and KGB all over the scene. "She scares me, CC," says Dante. He's almost as dead inside as Giltine, whose name is that of the goddess of death in ancient Lithuanian mythology, but Giltine has a special knack for recruiting people from bad novelists to Norman Bates wannabes to do her dirty work for her, a whole army of darkness. Can Dante and Colomba save the NATO powers from a woman who likes nothing better than to stick syringes full of mescaline and psylocibin into her victims' eyes? That question is answered with the most carefully crafted of cliffhangers, one that leaves the door wide open for more blood-spilling adventures to come.A harrowing if entertaining ride. Fans of Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter series will, beg pardon, eat this up.

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Starred review from February 1, 2018
Mass murder on a train from Milan to Rome kicks off an international quest for the elusive Angel of Death in this explosive follow-up to Kill the Father (2017). Rome Deputy Police Commissioner Colomba Caselli puts herself at risk when she discovers that all the first-class passengers on the train are dead, victims of a deadly gas. ISIS claims responsibility for the deaths in an amateurish video featuring two presumed perpetrators, and Caselli asks for help in identifying them from Dante Torre, a master at reading human behavior. After an ensuing shoot-out, Caselli, who's known to stray from accepted police procedures, is placed on administrative suspension. But by then, she and Torreboth damaged by traumas in their pasts, leaving her with panic attacks and him with severe claustrophobiahave gone too far to give up their quest for the woman they believe responsible for multiple murders in various countries. This is compelling crime fiction but not for the faint of heart or stomach, given the abundance of gruesome scenes (sequestering a deadly scorpion in the mouth of a child), but Dazieri mixes fact with conjecture to unrelentingly suspenseful effect, and he once again exits with a cliff-hanger. With complex and fallible characters and nonstop action, this is prime international crime fiction and a great fit for followers of David Hewson's Rome-set Nic Costa series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)