Bandit Love

August 23, 2010
In this lean, taut crime novel from Italian author Carlotto (The Fugitive), a burglary at the University of Padua sets off a series of related crimes that entangle ex-con turned PI Marco Buratti (aka "the Alligator") and his two partners. Buratti initially declines a prospective client's request to investigate the theft, which netted its perpetrators a cache of illegal drugs stored at the university's Institute of Legal Medicine. Things go south after Buratti decides to accept the offer, and the client, known only as "the guy with the ring," winds up dead. Two years later, the ring shows up in the car of the missing girlfriend of one of Buratti's partners. Complications ensue after the search for the woman forces the detectives to revisit the narcotics theft. Andrea Camilleri fans looking for something a little darker will be rewarded.

October 1, 2010

The tense, fast-paced book by Italian crime writer Carlotto is both familiar (in form, tone and plot, this hearkens back to 1930s noir by masters like Hammett, Chandler and Cain) and exotic (in its European settings—these are the mean streets not of Los Angeles or Chicago, but of Padua).

Nearing 50, Marco "The Alligator" Buratti is a retired mobster, or anyway a mobster who would dearly like to be retired, left to sip Calvados and listen to blues in the dive he co-owns, "The Dog's Bed." He's now a small-scale private investigator and fixer, also a part-time righter of wrongs against mistreated prostitutes. But when his old friend Beniamino Rossini's beloved is kidnapped and put into sexual bondage by the diabolically vengeful partner of a man Buratti, Rossini and their pal Max the Memory killed years earlier, the three have no choice but to re-enter the game. Part of the reason they've stayed alive into middle age is that they've studiously avoided drug trafficking, with its unpredictability and extreme violence, but this case takes them quickly and deeply into conflict with a savage Eastern European drug cartel that's been funneling drugs from the former Yugoslavia into Italy and beyond. All the hallmarks of noir are here: bloodbaths galore, a false-floored plot, a plainspoken and staccato style (the translation is smooth), and a hero who's simultaneously ruthless and sensitive, with a quirky but precisely calibrated moral sense that Carlotto explores and explains with panache. And the setting is beautifully—if grimly—realized.

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October 15, 2010
Carlotto, whose own life has been as eventful (The Fugitive, 2007) as those of his fictional characters, returns with the fifth tale starring Marco Buratti, aka The Alligator. Buratti is an unlicensed PI in Padua, a former blues singer, and an ex-con. When Sylvie, the lover of Burattis friend and partner in crime, Beniamino Rossini, is kidnapped, Buratti, Rossini, and Max la Memoria (Max the Memory) begin a frantic search for her throughout northeastern Italy. Their efforts pit them against corrupt officialdom, bent cops, Serbian spies, and murderous Mafioso from Serbia, Kosovo, and other former Soviet-bloc regions vying to control Italys most prosperous area. The timeless Italian idea of vendetta is at the heart of this tale, but the portrait of an Italy rife with corruption, drugs, and vigilantes attacking illegal immigrants seems very New World. And the lovelorn Buratti, who would prefer to be sitting in a seedy club listening to the blues and drinking Calvados, must honor Rossinis old-school quest for revenge. Its noir, Italian-style, in the vein of Michael Dibdins Blood Rain (2000).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)