Il respiro del faggio

Between universities, porticoes, and taverns, Bologna seems like a promise of happiness: cultured, welcoming, young. But every city has a shadow, and that of Emilia is denser than the illusions that protect it. When an elderly wealthy woman is found brutally murdered in her apartment with few signs of a struggle, and a foreign-origin boy, Mihai, falls from scaffolding in the suburbs, the news follows predictable tracks: a son fleeing from a psychiatric clinic, a workplace accident. All too simple. Not for Chief Inspector Antonio Petrella, a disillusioned official with a past in G8-era Genoa, nor for Vera Rotari, Italian enough to feel at home and Moldovan enough to be a perfect interpreter. Their investigations proceed in parallel: he digging into the shadowy areas of the salons that matter; she following the traces of Mihai, from construction sites in the suburbs to the Romagna gambling dens. But the two paths are destined to intersect, as in the past, when Vera was a girl with a permit to renew and Antonio was the first policeman who had helped her. Under a leaden sky, the investigation transforms into something more: a crossing of borders, between what one has been and what one becomes.

Fabio Rodda constructs a noir that goes beyond the investigation and vividly shows the light and shadow of a contemporary city and its protagonists, suspended in a present that wants to overcome the past but risks shattering before tomorrow.