Maria Viani, semiautobiographic character of the Ligurian writer Maria Teresa Valle, is a prepared and conscientious hospital biologist, but she has made a wrong job.
For the determination and the sense of a thoroughbred hound in solving the police cases within which is found more or less by chance dragged (let’s say, rather, that does not do anything to not get involved body and soul …), the Viani would I could do an excellent career in the Police, and if we do not find it incisive and dynamic commissioner, or even higher up in the hierarchy, it is only by chance.
The investigating biologist likes to repeat that any mysterious crime arouses in her the uncontrollable curiosity of knowing “who how where when why”.
As well as a valued specialist, she is also a family mother with a busy husband and young children, the singular and risky hobby procures a few embarrassments, so that, at the end of each adventure, solemnly promises to the family and the police, that ” true “, with which he ends up crossing the road, never again dealing with criminal investigations.
Commitment happily always disregarded.
“Delitto a Capo Santa Chiara” (name of a beautiful promontory in the municipality of Boccadasse) is the tenth investigation by Maria Viani, all published by Fratelli Frulli Editore.
As already in the previous novel, “The boys of Ponte Carrega”, Viani is grappling with a case with a historical background, which projects the reader into the distant but suggestive years immediately preceding the Second World War.
The detective biologist is engaged in a retrospective investigation, trying to shed light in the dark murder of a rich countess, wife of a senior officer of the Italian army serving in the Imperial Libyan colony.
In 1938 the woman was found dead by a fierce stab in a splendid liberty villa, now abandoned, in Capo Santa Chiara.
Having learned of the Viani affair, since the solution at the time given to the case appears to be rather unsatisfactory, it can not fail to go to the bottom.
In the end, after several adventures, some trouble and numerous surprises of elements slot, the investigator succeeds, with the usual inspired stubbornness, to discover the truth about that crime of fifty years ago.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the novel is that Mary finds herself completing the work of the Fascist Police Commissioner who investigated in 1938, a singular, surly and afflicted by such an obsessive “rupophobia” that would have made the joy of Sigmund Freud , but all in one piece and scrupulous.
He was relieved of the assignment and transferred as soon as the inquiry came to touch important local notables.
As we know from an interview with the author, Maria Viani has stuck with arrogance as a character in search of an author in history, which included the only protagonist Dr. Damiano Flexi Gerardi, this is the name of the Commissioner of ’38.
We have the feeling, and also the hope, that we will resent talking about both …
Rino Casazza
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