Gran bel libro anche questo e, come al solito, Carofiglio non tradisce.
Ambientato in un periodo difficile da dimenticare, un’estate che più che fredda definirei gelida, con un protagonista, il maresciallo Pietro Fenoglio, che colpisce per intelligenza e umanità. Accanto un contorno di personaggi anche loro difficili da dimenticare e una storia atroce che ruota attorno alla scomparsa di un bambino.
Lo stile è come sempre asciutto e preciso e accompagna al meglio la lettura che scorre con facilità e vero piacere.
Un altro libro indimenticabile e imperdibile.
( )

Real Rating: 4.75* of five, rounded up

The Publisher Says: The summer of 1992 had been exceptionally cold in southern Italy. But that’s not the reason why it is still remembered.

On May 23, 1992, a roadside explosion killed the Palermo judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police officers. A few weeks later judge Paolo Borsellino and five police officers were killed in the center of Palermo. These anti-mafia judges became heroes but the violence spread to the region of Bari in Puglia, where we meet a new, memorable character, Maresciallo Pietro Fenoglio, an officer of the Italian Carabinieri. Fenoglio, recently abandoned by his wife, must simultaneously deal with his personal crisis and the new gang wars raging around Bari.

The police are stymied until a gang member, accused of killing a child, decides to collaborate, revealing the inner workings and the rules governing organised crime in the area. The story is narrated through the actual testimony of the informant, a trope reminiscent of verbatim theatre which Carofiglio, an ex-anti-mafia judge himself, uses to great effect.

The gangs are stopped but the mystery of the boy’s murder must still be solved, leading Fenoglio into a world of deep moral ambiguity, where the prosecutors are hard to distinguish from the prosecuted.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The cold summer indeed...very cold for those whose Earthly remains could, thanks to massive bombs killing them, be measured in teaspoons. Author Carofiglio was, during that memorable summer that turned the tide against the Sicilian Mafia and its other regional affiliates, a working prosecutor fairly early in his career. His story, as told here, is one that truly feels like it happened exactly this way despite its being fiction. When one knows the author's history, it does inform the experience of reading the author's words. In this case, I've been on Team Carofiglio since I first discovered the Guerrieri series a decade-plus ago.

In this book's case, it's the second Fenoglio novel written but the first translated into English. In Italian, the first one's called Una mutevole verità or literally "A Changing Truth" but I'd probably call it "Slippery Facts" or something similarly indicative of dishonesty. It's a much shorter work and isn't about Fenoglio so much as about how a man in his position...a "foreigner" to the Barese he works with since he's from Piedmont-Savoy (basically France to the Southern Italians)...can see but not get what he's seeing. This outing, being about a gigantic trauma that shook Italy to its core, makes more sense to have come out first in the series.

The set-up for the story is Author Carofiglio's usual quiet, meandering walk through the detective's days as the crime is committed and he begins to look into the causes and results of it. About midway through, a huge shift happens. In this story, the shift is a break in the wall of silence around organized crime's activities. All it takes is one lousy creep afraid of getting punished for a particularly unpopular crime (child harm is a death sentence in most prisons around the world) to blow open the stalled cases he knows about.

Structurally, the way Author Carofiglio manages the case-breaking event in this book is to spend several chapters on the scumbag's interrogation. This isn't flash-fast, as I imagine you're thinking it might be. Italian crime fighting moves at a different pace and to a different rhythm than the US version. The cast of characters is different because the legal system is organized very differently, with responsibilities split in different directions. That, for my dollar, is one of the selling points of these books. I am absolutely enrapt in the cast of legal characters and eager to hear more about what they do and why they do it...I suspect Translator Curtis, having worked on a half-dozen or more Carofiglio novels in several series (as well as no series at all), is responsible for the ways some characters discourse explanatorily...as it sharpens the pleasure of being swept up in a very different world. That being something I look for, and forward to, in my reads, I'm happy as Larry while it's going on. YMMV, of course, so don't forget to account for your own tolerance for exposition when choosing these reads.

The reason I'm fond of Fenoglio, and I suspect I'd be fond of Author Carofiglio, is the way his policemen philosophize:

“I like finding out what happened. In so far as it’s possible. I like that people trust me and decide to tell me what they know, even in the most unexpected situations. I like it when what I do – and it does happen – gives a little dignity back to those who’ve lost it. It gives meaning to chaos.”

–and–

The problem is that we like to control everything: a stupid, pointless, unhealthy idea. We need to have the opposite attitude, accept the fact that nobody really has any control over his or her own life: that was what the barman Nicola, from the Caffè Bohème, had said to him once.

One day at a time. He had also added that it’s a good rule not to take anything personally. We think that everything revolves around us: both what other people do and what they don’t do. It’s almost never true. Things happen and that’s it; most other people are uninterested in us, for good or ill.

The quiet musings of Pietro Fenoglio, an intelligent man, as he works his way through the complexities of human venality and evil, demanding a reckoning for those not able to demand one for themselves. I like this pace, this path, and this person's journey. I will say that I found the bad actors all a bit interchangeable. I can't for the life of me remember one's name without looking it up to be sure I'm not misassigning another one's name to him. Nothing made by human hands can ever be perfect, can it. But very damned good, this one's got locked down. ( )

The Cold Summer is a fascinating police procedural involves the amputation of one small arm of the Mafia in Apulia, a region that constitutes the heel of Italy’s boot. Marshal Pietro Fenoglio is a carabinieri officer in the region’s capital, Bari, investigating the kidnapping and death of the young son of local mafia leader Nicola Grimaldi.
Speculation is that rivalries within the ranks of Grimaldi’s organization precipitated the kidnapping, as it’s one of a wave of occurrences linked to organized crime sweeping the area. “Probably the most respected and certainly the most intelligent” of Grimaldi’s lieutenants, Vito Lopez, has disappeared. His wife and son have disappeared, too,which suggests the family is in hiding and makes Lopez a prime suspect in the kidnapping. Certainly, the Grimaldi family believes Lopez is the culprit. The growing rift in the Grimaldi organization could be a way to bring the family down, if only Fenoglio can figure out how to do it.
The story is set in mid-1992, the “cold summer,” infamous in Italian law enforcement. First came the murders of prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three members of their police escort in a bomb blast outside Palermo. Less than two months later, prosecutor Paolo Borsellino and five members of his police escort also were murdered. These real-life events shake up not only Carofiglio’s fictional characters, but the Italian people as well, leading to a crackdown on the mafia and new, harsher penalties for convicted mafiosi. Carofiglio thus places his story in an era that was particularly dangerous and high-stakes for police, prosecutors, and criminals alike.
Carofiglio’s characters are believable, flawed, and interesting. The carabinieri, never free from the oppressive danger around them, move forward cautiously, but with purpose. Fenoglio is especially articulate in his musings about the “grey areas” in society in which many people, including his colleagues and even himself and his investigation, often operate.
To everyone’s surprise, Lopez turns himself in. He knows he’s a dead man without police protection and maybe even with it. The interviews of him by Assistant Prosecutor Gemma D’Angelo are presented as question-and-answer transcripts, devoid of editorial comment, gesture, or any emotion. This dry style is remarkably effective and makes Lopez’s confession even more powerful by its simplicity. Despite the many crimes he confesses to, he is adamant in denying involvement in the Grimaldi boy’s kidnapping. On that crime, Fenoglio and Pellecchia appear back to square one.
When reading a book that has been translated, you can never be certain how closely the style adheres to the original. In this case, Howard Curtis has produced an English-language text that reads exceedingly smoothly, yet manages to convey the aura of the original Italian. You never feel as if you are reading a translation, but the original.
Carofiglio is an award-winning novelist and a Bari native. He has long experience as a prosecutor specializing in organized crime, which informs this well-crafted novel beginning to end. It’s a pleasure to read and to spend a little time (safely) in Fenoglio’s perilous world. ( )

The Cold Summer is a police procedural that takes place in Italy during the time when the mafia waged open war on the police and the courts, including bombing two judges. Author Gianrico Carofiglio writes from personal experience. He was an anti-mafia prosecutor and judge. This story opens as an internecine mafia conflict seems to be erupting in Bari. the capital of Puglia, right at the top of Italy’s heel. Even though it’s not near the epicenter of Mafia power, the Mafia still holds a lot of power in the city.

But this intrafamilial war took a nasty turn when the local leader’s son was kidnapped. Who would dare? When the young boy’s body is found, it suddenly becomes far too ugly.

The investigation was largely directed by Marshal Fenoglio of the Carabinieri, a reserved and formal man who seems incorruptible, though compassionate. He works hard and trusts the process of shoe leather, research, talking to people, and listening. It seems to work pretty well in leading him to the leader of the faction rebelling against the local boss. Although it seems so very certain he must have been the kidnapper, he denies it and Fenoglio thinks he just might be telling the truth. So while the rest of the Carabinieri think the case is settled, he and his partner keep on investigating.

I enjoyed The Cold Summer quite a bit. While some parts were a bit too legalistic, presenting the interrogation as questions and answers without the usual cajoling, narrowing in on the facts, looking for inconsistencies, so it felt like a finished transcript, not a real interrogation. Sometimes certain statues were explained in quoted text and analysis. He’s writing what he knows too literally. But this is more than counterbalanced by the wonderful conversations between Fenoglio and his colleague Pellecchia. They talk about the indistinct boundaries between right and wrong, really, they talk about life.

I have to mention the translator Howard Curtis. The translation is so smooth that it feels as though it were written in English. More than that, he is able to retain the poetry that I imagine the original most hold when Fenoglio sees the sky as a tragic blue. There are these active metaphors such as when Fenoglio has an early morning swim and leaves before the hot sun begins to eat his skin. Fenoglio is a reader and a thinker (or more accurately Carofiglio is) and it’s wonderful to listen to him thinking. I am looking forward to many more by this author.

I received a copy of The Cold Summer from the publisher through Edelweiss. It will be released on September 4th.

The Cold Summer at Bitter Lemon Press
Gianrico Carofiglio on Wikipedia

★★★★
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/the-cold-summer-by-gianri... ( )

Spændende, velskrevet krimi om krigen mod den organiserede kriminalitet. Foregår i året 1992, hvor bl.a. dommer Falcone blev dræbt. Fine personskildringer. ( )