From the bestselling author of Black Run comes Antonio Manzinis mesmerizing second mystery novel featuring detective Rocco Schiavone.

Six months after being exiled from his beloved Rome, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone has settled into a routine in the cold, quiet, chronically backward alpine town of Aosta: an espresso at home, breakfast in the piazza, and a morning joint in his office.

A little self-medication helps Rocco deal with the morons that almost exclusively comprise the local force. Especially on a day like today. Its his girlfriends birthday (if you could call her that; in his mind, Roccos only faithful to his late wife), he has no giftand hes about to stumble upon a corpse.

It begins when a maid reports a burglary in Aosta. But theres no sign of forced entry, and after Rocco picks the lock, he notices something off about the carefully ransacked rooms. Thats when he finds the body: a woman, the maids employer, left hanging after a grisly suicide. Or is it? Roccos intuition tells him the scene has been staged. In other words, its murdera pain in the ass of the highest order.

In this stylish international mystery, Antonio Manzini further establishes Rocco Schiavone as one of the most acerbic, complicated, and entertaining antiheroes crime fiction has seen in years.