Temporary Perfections

July 18, 2011
Guido Guerrieri looks into a cold case in Carofiglio's absorbing fourth legal thriller featuring the self-deprecating defense attorney (after Reasonable Doubts). Six months after beautiful 22-year-old Manuela Ferraro disappeared on her way home to Bari from Rome, where she was a college student, Manuela's parents are desperate. The carabinieri who handled the investigation are about to give up. As a favor to a fellow lawyer, Guerrieri agrees to help, though it means doing more detective work than usual. Fortyish, divorced, and recently dumped by a lover, Guerrieri suffers from Proustian memory fugues centered on painful episodes in his youth that become increasingly frequent as he approaches a solution to the mysteryâa solution that nauseates him because it forces him to obey his own tough code of integrity. A satisfyingly complex protagonist and well-drawn secondary characters more than compensate for a relatively thin plot.

September 15, 2011
The fourth Guido Guerrieri novel finds the lawyer settled in his new offices in Bari in southwestern Italy and getting used to his larger staff. When an old friend calls and asks him to look into a missing-person case, he is reluctant to poke around in something the police have not been able to solve, but he has little else taking up his time. As he begins to dig into 22-year-old Manuela Ferraro's inexplicable disappearance after a weekend at the beach, Guerrieri senses that something isn't quite right, including his attraction to Caterina, one of Manuela's friends. The moderate pacing of the book perfectly matches Guerrieri's leisurely approach to the investigation and will remind readers of Salvo Montalbano, star of Andrea Camilleri's popular series, set in Sicily. Like Camilleri, Carofiglio captures the special ambience of southern Italy in both his hero's approach to life and his description of the landscape.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)