The Bottom of Your Heart

Starred review from September 14, 2015
De Giovanni’s complex, lyrical seventh whodunit set in Fascist Italy (after Viper) finds Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, a public safety officer in Naples who has been cursed with the ability to see images of the recently dead, even more miserable than usual after a romantic failure. Ricciardi gets some distraction from his personal woes after Tullio Iovine del Castello, a prominent gynecologist, takes a fatal fall from a top floor window of the general hospital of the royal university. Since the trajectory of the fall rules out an accident, the commissario and his loyal sidekick, Brigadier Raffaele Maione, look into the possibility of murder. De Giovanni adds psychological depth to the suspects, as shown in a section giving the perspective of a man who lost his wife during childbirth due to Castello’s neglect. A searing look at the tortured soul of the lead makes this entry especially memorable.

October 1, 2015
Crime and punishment are only a single strand of an intricately layered whodunit set in Fascist Naples. Mastro Nicola Coviello, the hunchbacked goldsmith who was the last person to see professor Tullio Iovine del Castello at the city's general hospital during a stifling summer night, tells Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi that he also saw a man sitting outside the office, a hulking figure who's just the sort of person to have grabbed the chair of gynecology and tossed him out his office window. But his description does little to narrow the field of gigantic suspects ranging from Guido di Roccasole, the medical student Iovine failed three times on his qualifying exam to spite his dying father, an old rival, to Guiseppe "Peppino the Wolf" Graziani, a low-level criminal whose wife died in childbirth while Iovine was out of the hospital. Even Ricciardi's own right-hand man, Brigadier Raffaele Maione, who's consumed with fear that his wife, Lucia, has begun an affair with philandering lawyer Ferdinando Pianese, fits the physical type Ricciardi is seeking. Instead of focusing on Coviello's description, however, the Commissario attends more closely to Iovine's dying thoughts of someone called Sisinella. In each of his previous cases, Ricciardi's been mysteriously privy to the victim's last thoughts, which this time will connect the killer's motive to Ricciardi's preoccupation with his old governess Rosa Vaglio's impending death and his inability to confess his love for schoolteacher Enrica Colombo]though not at all in the way he expects. De Giovanni (The Crocodile, 2013, etc.) takes so much time to evoke Ricciardi's Naples that you'd think he was laying the foundation of the world. But it all pays off in a richly textured story whose murder is nothing more than the point of entry.

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November 1, 2015

In this seventh entry (after By My Hand), de Giovanni riffs with poetic intensity on the vagaries of love, a seed that sprouts at the bottom of the hearts of several characters and that leads to murder. In 1932, ten years into Mussolini's fascist rule, Commissario Ricciardi and his assistant, Brigadier Maione of the Neapolitan police, both struggle with relationships. Maione thinks his wife is having an affair; Ricciardi is torn between his love for a young woman and his fear of passing on his inherited and disturbing ability to hear the last thoughts of murder victims. In the torrid days of mid-July just before the Festival of the Black Madonna, a medical professor has been tossed to his death from a hospital window. Several suspects present themselves to the investigators, most notably the professor's lover (a former prostitute), a hood angry that his pregnant wife died due to the professor's negligence, and a retired doctor whose son the professor has more than once maliciously failed. Only a painstaking examination of the lives and loves of these and other characters will lead to the perpetrator. VERDICT Fascinating characters, all leading rich emotional lives, make this an outstanding work of literary fiction that will appeal not only to mystery fans but to all those interested in the many foibles of the human heart.--Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

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