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Rating: Fabrizio Borgio is a man with a serious demeanor, who loves to portray himself under a wide-brimmed hat (somewhere between Indiana Jones and Maigret), in a waistcoat and pocket watch with a chain. Not to show off and create a scene, but to dress his soul before his body. He lives in his house on a hill from where he dominates the panorama of 'his' Langhe.
But he enjoys using a hand pallet truck as a skateboard in the warehouse where he is the department head; and above all, he writes.
Because Fabrizio Borgio is also a writer, of the new generation but from the old school.
He knows how to build plots and bring out characters from real life but using the 'right' words, without excesses and without cloying. In the typical, simple, and dry style of the writers of 'his' land (I won’t mention names not to embarrass him…).
When I finished reading this "Asti ceneri sepolte" (Fratelli Frilli Editori), I immediately felt the urge to take pen and paper and write myself: something that happens to me every time I finish a good book.
The plot is quickly told:
Private investigator Giorgio Martinengo is on his shift at 118, in the heat of a summer evening, when almost simultaneously two calls come in: in Asti, there has been an explosion at a company specializing in waste storage and not far away there is an accident, an SUV and a motorcycle collide: one dead and one in a coma. The coincidence wants that the two are the owners of the same company destroyed by the fire. And from there begins a journey into hell.
Fabrizio Borgio 'knows' what he writes about, in the sense that in the end, he tells his life: he lives in the places he describes; he is a volunteer of the CRI; he is not a private investigator but, deep down, maybe he would like to be one.
He certainly investigates the evils of our society of which, in this second novel featuring Martinengo, he tackles the trafficking of toxic waste and the undergrowth of economic and social schemes surrounding it.
But he also tells us about flesh-and-blood people who suffer in body and soul and who fight to keep their heads above the muck in which our world seems to be immersed.
In a single night, between an ambulance run and two minutes of rest stolen from urgencies and the heat, Martinengo manages to unravel the mess helped by his friends/collaborators and to bring justice (at least in the book!) to the many who, in real life, died for the private interests of unscrupulous people, killed by ecomafias and that dreadful evil that destroyed (and continues to destroy) generations of asbestos workers and those living (or lived) near the factories.
Fabrizio (of whom I envy his writing room, with glass walls overlooking dreamlike hills and valleys) has another character, longer-lived, Stefano Drago, agent of a mysterious Department of Paranormal Investigations, who moves between inexplicable events and heinous crimes, between Masche and disappeared magic books, all rigorously set between Langhe and Monferrato.
What do I like about Fabrizio's writing (whom I 'know' through social media)?
The conciseness of the sentence without falling into mere descriptivism.
Making you get to know the characters gradually, letting them be discovered through their interaction with each other, laying them bare in a real way not artificially like so much of today's literature, which seems to have mistaken the pages of a book for a reality show.
For the little I know about Fabrizio Borgio, I know that at this moment, reading these lines, he will have turned red and will be quietly mocking himself: oh, come on! What are you saying!
The only way to know if I’m telling the truth or if this is just flattery is to read this or some other novel of his (by the way! "Morte ad Asti. La nebbiosa domenica dell'investigatore Martinengo" has just been released).
Then you’ll tell me.
P.S.: warning to Debaser readers: having still little familiarity with DB, I mistakenly placed the mention "esoterico" in the book's definition. "Esoterico" refers to Borgio's other work aspect, as is evident from the review. For this book, it is accurate only as a thriller. I apologize...
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