The Monster of Florence

October 15, 2013

First published in 1996 but never released in the United States until now, Nabb's tenth of 14 novels featuring Marshal Guarnaccia of the Carabinieri is based on actual crimes that rocked Italy from 1968 to 1985. A killer has terrorized Florence over two decades, assaulting lovers in their cars, murdering them, and mutilating the women's bodies. He's never been apprehended. Now a publicity-happy prosecutor sees the chance to hang these crimes on an ex-convict whose past offenses are so vile that no one will feel sympathy for him when he's charged. Guarnaccia smells a rat and sets about destroying the prosecutor's case. This complicated mystery isn't easy to follow, but tension builds, and Guarnaccia is an appealing character. VERDICT This series was popular in the 1980s and 1990s, so fans who mourned the author's death in 2007 will want this mystery. [For a nonfiction account of this case, see Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi's The Monster of Florence.--Ed.]

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2013
Nabb's death, in 2007, left a serious hole in the roster of A-list mystery writers, and the publication of a posthumous novel starring her series hero, Marshal Guarnaccia, of the Florence Carabinieri, is a welcome event for all fans of international crime fiction. The novel, originally published in the UK in 1999, has curiously never appeared in the U.S. It's an odd book in some ways, based on a real-life serial killer, the Monster of Florence, whose reign of terror lasted more than 20 years and who may or may not have been apprehended. Guarnaccia, assigned to a cold-case squad tasked with reopening the still-unsolved murders, spends much of the book reading files (and the marshal is not a reader by nature) and mulling over not only whether the suspect being investigated is in fact the killer but also why he was chosen for the task force. The reliance on so many secondary sources, though no doubt fascinating to those who know the real-life case, tends to slow the narrative flow, but, fortunately, there is more than enough of Guarnaccia's Columbo-like mix of bumbling and shrewdness to please fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)