If
you had the impression that Grisham's The Broker was
perhaps a little fake, set in but a few streets of a rather wooden
Bologna, in Lei è il mio peccato/She Is My Sin,
you will find everything that was missing from the American novel.
A credible city, with many facets, where the emergent Romanian mafia
has joined forces with a masonic middle-class determined to defend
its own privileges at any cost. A city which is not only made up
of its historical centre and monuments, but also of luxurious hilltop
villas and decaying areas left to their own devices, where crime
prospers unhindered (the novel's Hotel Romania, for example, as well
as the place called Hell, are instantly recognisable as real locations
which have been at the heart of various news stories relating to
Bologna). A very Italian city, where two police forces deal with
the same cases, often working in competition with each other without
swapping information, and who, in order to justify their separate
existence, are forced to divide the city's neighbourhoods into sectors
which are alternately patrolled by police and carabinieri ,
depending on the days of the week. A city, and a nation, in which
being a mason is different from what it might be in, for example,
Britain.
Lei è il mio
peccato is a good and solid novel,
full of suspense, which undermines the myth according to which action
necessarily entails a lack of depth in the characters. And Bettini's
confident style cannot help but increase the reader's enjoyment.
A man – Gianfranco Marozzi,
an estate agent – is killed in the gardens
of a psychiatric clinic. The owner of the clinic is a building speculator,
a member of the middle-class ‘that counts', who tries to place obstacles
in the way of the investigations led by homicide chief Paolo Mormino,
by making use of all his political and social weight, without excluding
violence. At the same time as Marozzi's murder, a carabinieri raid
to capture a dangerous Romanian who is on the run misses its target.
If there is a connection between the two things, nobody notices it,
because the two forces conduct their investigations in isolation.
Then, after a second murder, the case is taken away from Mormino
and given to the carabinieri . But by now the homicide chief
wants to get to the bottom of the case. He has started following
a lead which is tied to the porn dvds the deceased made along with
lovers and prostitutes. He has met Francesca, Marozzi's lover, who
appears in many of the dvds: she is young, provocative, beautiful.
Going against all normal procedures, Mormino allows himself to be
swept away by the girl's sensuality and he begins a relationship
with her, to the dark rhythms of Nightwish's She
Is My Sin.
As events rush on, Paolo Mormino, helped by superintendent Comper
(a hardcore native of Trento who will never get on in the job because
he speaks too much in his local dialect), will have to risk everything,
including his own life, in order to unravel the case. And he will
do so for various reasons, but perhaps above all because, in his
own desire for justice, there is no innocence.
