"The role of Guido Guerrieri is to take on impossible cases that have little chance of success. The lawyer accepts the case only because he's fallen in lust with the prisoner's wife; his efforts to prove his client's innocence bring him into dangerous conflict with Mafia interests. Everything a legal thriller should be."--"The Times"

Counsel for the defense Guido Guerrieri is asked to handle the appeal of Fabio Paolicelli, who has been sentenced to sixteen years for drug smuggling. The odds are stacked against the accused: not only the fact that he initially confessed to the crime but also his past as a neo-Fascist thug. It is only the intervention of Paolicelli's beautiful half-Japanese wife that finally overcomes Guerrieri's reluctance. Matters are further complicated when Guerrieri ends up in bed with her.

This book is hard-boiled and sun-dried in equal parts. Where Philip Marlowe would be knocking back bourbon and listening to the snap of fist on jaw, Guerrieri prefers Sicilian wine and Leonard Cohen. The local color is complemented by snappy legal procedural writing which sends the reader tumbling through the clockwork of a tightly wound plot.

Gianrico Carofiglio, a member of the Senate in Italy, was an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Bari, a port on the coast of Puglia. He has been involved with trials concerning corruption, organized crime, and human trafficking. He has written four Guido Guerrieri novels, all bestsellers, having sold over a million copies worldwide.

"Carofiglio writes crisp, ironical novels that are as much love stories and philosophical treatises as they are legal thrillers."--"The New Yorker"

"Raises the standard for crime fiction. Carofiglio's deft touch has given us a story that is both literary and gritty--and one that speeds along like the best legal thrillers. His insights into human nature--good and bad--are breathtaking." --Jeffery Deaver

The first in the Guido Guerrieri series.

A nine-year-old boy is found murdered at the bottom of a well near a popular beach resort in southern Italy. In what looks like a hopeless case for Guido Guerrieri, counsel for the defense, a Senegalese peddler is accused of the crime. Faced with small-town racism fuelled by the recent immigration from Africa, Guido attempts to exploit the esoteric workings of the Italian courts.

More than a perfectly paced legal thriller, this relentless suspense novel transcends the genre. A powerful attack on racism and a fascinating insight into the Italian judicial process, it is also an affectionate portrait of a deeply humane hero.

Gianrico Carofiglio, a member of the senate in Italy, was an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Bari, a port on the coast of Puglia. He has been involved with trials concerning corruption, organized crime, and the traffic of human beings. He has written four Guido Guerrieri novels, all bestsellers, having sold over two million copies worldwide.

The electrifying best-selling crime thriller from Italy, available for the first time in English. An instant sensation and number-one best seller since its publication, "Temporary Perfections" is the fourth crime novel by former Italian prosecutor Gianrico Carofiglio to feature Guido Guerrieri. A lawyer practicing in Bari, in southwest Italy, Guido Guerrieri is hired by an old colleague to work a missing-persons case that the police have failed to solve. Manuela Ferraro disappeared six months ago after spending a September weekend at a beach resort; as Guerrieri digs deep into her life and activities, he stumbles into a sinister drug ring and the real truth about why Ferraro vanished.
Simultaneously thoughtful and suspenseful, this is crime fiction at its best.

"Carofiglio writes crisp, ironical novels that are as much love stories and philosophical treatises as they are legal thrillers."--"The New Yorker"

"Part legal thriller, part insight into a man fighting his own demons. Every character in Carofiglio's fiction has a story to tell and they are always worth hearing. As the author himself is an anti-mafia prosecutor, this powerfully affecting novel benefits from veracity as well as tight writing."--"Daily Mail"

"A novel as much about human nature and the passage of time as it is about law-breaking. Crisp laconic sentences, subtle shifts in tone, and a seamless translation that should be commended."--"The Times Literary Supplement"

When Martina accuses her ex-boyfriend, the son of a powerful local judge, of assault and battery, no witnesses can be persuaded to testify on her behalf, and one lawyer after another refuses to represent her. Guido Guerrieri knows the case could bring his legal career to a premature, messy end, but he cannot resist the appeal of an apparently hopeless cause. Nor can he deny an attraction to Sister Claudia, the young woman in charge of the shelter where Martina is living. Claudia shares his love of martial arts and his virulent hatred of injustice.

Gianrico Carofiglio was an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Bari, a port on the coast of Puglia, for many years, and is now a member of the Italian senate. He has sold over 2.5 million books of the Guerrieri series in Italy alone.

A woman on the run from her past. A child on the run from reality. A man on the run from himself. Carofiglio confronts the dark side of the human soul in this captivating story of fall and redemption. Every week, Roberto Marias crosses Rome on foot to arrive at his psychiatrist's office. There, he often sits in silence, stumped by the ritual - but sometimes crucial memories come to the surface. He remembers when he was a child and used to surf with his father. He remembers the treacherous years he spent working as an under-cover carabinieri, years that taught him how cynicism and corruption are not merely external influences, but also exist within us. He has lived an intoxicating and crushing life, but now his psychiatrist's words, the hypnotic strolls through Rome, and a meeting with a woman named Emma - who like Roberto is ravaged by a profound guilt - are beginning to revive him. And when eleven-year-old Giacomo asks Roberto to help him conquer his nightmares, Roberto at last achieves a true rebirth.

One spring afternoon, defence attorney Guerrieri is confronted with an unexpected spectre from his past. In her youth, Lorenza had been a beautiful and unpredictable girl with dazzling charm. A changed woman faces him in his office that day. The ensuing years have ravaged her appearance and embittered her mind. As if that weren't enough, her son Jacopo, a small-time delinquent, stands convicted of the first-degree murder of a local drug dealer. Her trial lawyer has died, so, for the appeal, she turns to Guerrieri as her last hope. Guido is not convinced of the innocence of Lorenza's son, nor does he have fond memories of the way their relationship ended two decades earlier. Nevertheless, he accepts the case; perhaps to pay a melancholy homage to the ghosts of his youth. His old friend Carmelo Tancredi, a retired police inspector, and his girlfriend, the charming investigator Annapaola Doria are once again by his side. A masterful, compassionate novel, striking a balance between a straightforward trial story -some say the purest distillation of human experience - and the sad notes of time as it passes and exhausts itself.

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning." - F. Scott Fitzgerald A coming-of-age novel-a heady union of Before Sunrise and Beautiful Ruins-about a father and his teenage son who are forced to spend two sleepless nights exploring the city of Marseilles, a journey of unexpected adventure and profound discovery that helps them come to truly know each other. Antonio is eighteen years old and on the cusp of adulthood. His father, a brilliant mathematician, hasn't played a large part in his life since divorcing Antonio's mother but when Antonio is diagnosed with epilepsy, they travel to Marseille to visit a doctor who may hold the hope for an effective treatment. It is there, in a foreign city, under strained circumstances, that they will get to know each other and connect for the first time. A beautiful, gritty, and charming port city where French old-world charm meets modern bohemia, father and son stroll the streets sharing strained small talk. But as the hours pass and day gives way to night, the two find themselves caught in a series of caffeine-imbued adventures involving unexpected people (and unforeseen trysts) that connect father and son for the first time. As the two discuss poetry, family, sex, math, death, and dreams, their experience becomes a mesmerizing 48-hour microcosm of a lifetime relationship. Both learn much about illusions and regret, about talent and redemption, and, most of all, about love. Elegant, warm, and tender, set against the vivid backdrop of 1980s Marseille and its beautiful calanques-a series of cliffs and bays on the city's outskirts-Three O'Clock in the Morning is a bewitching coming-of-age story imbued with nostalgia and a revelatory exploration of time and fate, youth and adulthood. Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis

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.

When Judge Larocca is the subject of corruption allegations, Guerrieri goes against his better instincts and takes the case. After all they had been at school and university together. Helped by Annapaola Doria, a motorbike-riding bisexual private detective who keeps a baseball bat to hand for sticky situations, he discovers the judge's links to the mafia. Larocca is blind to the immorality of his actions but Annapaola makes sure that justice is done, perhaps not in the most orthodox way. Of course Guerrieri cannot stop himself from falling for Annapaola's exotic charms. The novel takes the form of a suspenseful legal thriller but it is much more. It is the story of a judge who , to quote Brothers Karamazov, "...lies to himself and listens to his own lies, so gets to the point where he can no longer distinguish the truth, either in himself or around himself." A man always looking to justify his evil and corrupt behaviour, perhaps an apposite metaphor for Italy itself.

In Carlotto's The Campagna Trail, Inspector Campagna uses an old friendship with notorious drug dealer Roby Pizzo in a Machiavellian attempt to keep the peace. But when an interfering new police chief demands Campagna bring down the Mafioso who heads PizzoaEURO (TM)s gang, Campagna must use every weapon he has to save his job aEURO" and his life. Meanwhile in Carofiglio's The Speed of an Angel, a writer in crisis strikes up an unlikely friendship with a mysterious woman he meets in a quiet seaside cafA (c). As their conversations deepen, and their obsessions darken, their drug-fuelled relationship begins to spiral, in this haunting tale of damnation and redemption. Finally in De Cataldo's The White Powder Dance, the city police are put on the trail of a baby-faced new graduate in the Milanese banking sector. As the pursuit accelerates through back streets and skyscrapers, it becomes clear that there is more to organised crime than getting your hands dirty.

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning." - F. Scott Fitzgerald A coming-of-age novel-a heady union of Before Sunrise and Beautiful Ruins-about a father and his teenage son who are forced to spend two sleepless nights exploring the city of Marseilles, a journey of unexpected adventure and profound discovery that helps them come to truly know each other. Antonio is eighteen years old and on the cusp of adulthood. His father, a brilliant mathematician, hasn't played a large part in his life since divorcing Antonio's mother but when Antonio is diagnosed with epilepsy, they travel to Marseille to visit a doctor who may hold the hope for an effective treatment. It is there, in a foreign city, under strained circumstances, that they will get to know each other and connect for the first time. A beautiful, gritty, and charming port city where French old-world charm meets modern bohemia, father and son stroll the streets sharing strained small talk. But as the hours pass and day gives way to night, the two find themselves caught in a series of caffeine-imbued adventures involving unexpected people (and unforeseen trysts) that connect father and son for the first time. As the two discuss poetry, family, sex, math, death, and dreams, their experience becomes a mesmerizing 48-hour microcosm of a lifetime relationship. Both learn much about illusions and regret, about talent and redemption, and, most of all, about love. Elegant, warm, and tender, set against the vivid backdrop of 1980s Marseille and its beautiful calanques-a series of cliffs and bays on the city's outskirts-Three O'Clock in the Morning is a bewitching coming-of-age story imbued with nostalgia and a revelatory exploration of time and fate, youth and adulthood. Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis