The Puppeteer is the follow-up to CWA Dagger-winner Timothy Williams's dazzling crime fiction debut, Converging Parallels (Soho Crime, 2014, available from Turnaround). This tautly-written novel takes us to the depths of a corrupt, scheming Italian society in which bank officials, clergymen, masons, lawyers and, of course, politicians are all suspect of resorting to criminal activity for personal gain. Only the police are deemed trustworthy, and even they are sorely divided by departmental rivalries and jealousies.