Italian Crime Fiction
Explore the best Italian crime fiction books with gripping plots, dark mysteries, and unforgettable detectives. Discover top-rated noir, thriller, and giallo novels from Italy's finest authors.
Book
Via Delle Oche
by Carlo Lucarelli
The final book in the De Luca trilogy. There has been a murder on Via delle Oche, the Bologna street at the center the city's notorious red light district. As always, De Luca is unwilling to look the other way when the evidence points to certain local politicians and members of the upper echelons of the Bologna police. A nation's fate is soon to be decided in bitterly contested elections; once again, the brutal worlds of crime and politics collude and collide, creating an atmosphere that becomes more volatile with each passing day.
Book
Night Bus
by Giampiero Rigosi
A thrilling black comedy: Leila, a young, beautiful hustler gets caught up in the centre of a political blackmail plot when a document ends up in her hands. In an intense environment of paranoia, secret service operatives, a goon hired by the blackmailer and the police all pursue Leila to retrieve the document and the suitcase of money for the pay-off. Desperate, she joins forces with Francesco, a bus driver and gambling addict on the run from a debt collector. The frenetic pace is set against a backdrop of torture and murder.
Book
Blackout
by Gianluca Morozzi
Bologna on the 15th August. Unbearable heat, an empty city. Claudia is a young student in a hurry to return to the hospital bedside of her dying grandmother. Tomas, a young punk, on his way to elope with his girlfriend Francesca and rescue her from her abusive father. Aldo is a husband with guilty secrets that must be erased from his apartment before his wife returns. All three have an urgent need to be somewhere else. But then they're trapped in a lift and the jeopardy escalates in this dark, twisting and taught psychological: one of them is a serial killer...
Book
Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio
by Amara Lakhous
After the body of a tenant is discovered in the elevator of an apartment building in Rome, the police gather widely different accounts of what may have led to the crime from each of the other tenants.
Book
First Execution
by Domenico Starnone
When retired teacher Domenico Stasi learns that Nina, his former student, has been accused of armed conspiracy, he agrees to help her by doing a simple task, but in doing so he becomes inexorably involved with her and her cause.
Book
The Father and the Foreigner
by Giancarlo De Cataldo
A slim but touching and autobiographical noir novel from one of Italy's best writers in the genre.--"Quanderni Noir" (Italy).
Book
Inspector Cataldo's Criminal Summer
by Luigi Guicciardi
In a quiet holiday town in the Italian Apennines, during a torrid summer, a string of gruesome deaths stirs up trouble in the local community. A suspected suicide which Inspector Cataldo is called in to investigate brings to the surface shady events belonging to the past and a mysterious foreigner shakes up the delicate social balance of a group of friends who have a lot to hide.
Book
Voice of the Violin
by Andrea Camilleri
“You either love Andrea Camilleri or you haven’t read him yet. Each novel in this wholly addictive, entirely magical series, set in Sicily and starring a detective unlike any other in crime fiction, blasts the brain like a shot of pure oxygen. Aglow with local color, packed with flint-dry wit, as fresh and clean as Mediterranean seafood — altogether transporting. Long live Camilleri, and long live Montalbano.” A.J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window Inspector Montalbano, praised as “a delightful creation” (USA Today), has been compared to the legendary detectives of Georges Simenon, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. As the fourth mystery in the internationally bestselling series opens, Montalbano’s gruesome discovery of a lovely, naked young woman suffocated in her bed immediately sets him on a search for her killer. Among the suspects are her aging husband, a famous doctor; a shy admirer, now disappeared; an antiques-dealing lover from Bologna; and the victim’s friend Anna, whose charms Montalbano cannot help but appreciate... But it is a mysterious, reclusive violinist who holds the key to the murder.
Book
The Paper Moon
by Andrea Camilleri
Inspector Montalbano investigates the fatal shooting of a man and finds himself dealing with two beautiful women as prime suspects, mysterious computer codes, threatening letters, and dirty cocaine.
Book
August Heat
by Andrea Camilleri
“The novels of Andrea Camilleri breathe out the sense of place, the sense of humor, and the sense of despair that fills the air of Sicily.” —Donna Leon When a colleague extends his summer vacation, Inspector Salvo Montalbano is forced to stay in Vigà ta and endure the August heat. Montalbano's long-suffering girlfriend, Livia, joins him with a friend—husband and young son in tow—to keep her company during these dog days of summer. But when the boy suddenly disappears into a narrow shaft hidden under the family's beach rental, Montalbano, in pursuit of the child, uncovers something terribly sinister. As the inspector spends the summer trying to solve this perplexing case, Livia refuses to answer his calls-and Montalbano is left to take a plunge that will affect the rest of his life. Fans of the Sicilian inspector as well as readers new to the popular series will enjoy following the melancholy but unflinchingly moral Montalbano as he undertakes one of the most shocking investigations of his career.
Book
The Wings of the Sphinx
by Andrea Camilleri
“You either love Andrea Camilleri or you haven’t read him yet. Each novel in this wholly addictive, entirely magical series, set in Sicily and starring a detective unlike any other in crime fiction, blasts the brain like a shot of pure oxygen. Aglow with local color, packed with flint-dry wit, as fresh and clean as Mediterranean seafood — altogether transporting. Long live Camilleri, and long live Montalbano.” A.J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window Things are not going well for Inspector Salvo Montalbano. His relationship with Livia is once again on the rocks and—acutely aware of his age—he is beginning to grow weary of the endless violence he encounters. Then a young woman is found dead, her face half shot off and only a tattoo of a sphinx moth giving any hint of her identity. The tattoo links her to three similarly marked girls-all victims of the underworld sex trade-who have been rescued from the Mafia night-club circuit by a prominent Catholic charity. The problem is, Montalbano's inquiries elicit an outcry from the Church and the three other girls are all missing.
