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Rating: These are the four novels featuring Duca Lamberti, a doctor disbarred for committing euthanasia. The author is the great master of Italian crime fiction, Giorgio Scebarnenco.
The titles: Private Venus, Betrayers of All, The Boys of the Massacre, The Milanese Kill on Saturdays.
Although they are four novels with different investigations, the main characters remain the same. The setting is Milan during the 60s/70s. A Milan remembered more for the street names with house numbers than for the literary description of the places.
The cases handled by the hero investigator, Dr. Duca Lamberti, are tough, dramatic stories, full of anger, but also with a lot of empathy and humanity that reveal the criminal world in all its most vile forms: drugs, prostitution, exploitation, extreme wickedness, especially in the last novel of the saga.
The quadrilogy begins with a beautiful story of friendship between the investigator Duca Lamberti and a young man destroyed by guilt, drowning in alcoholism, over the death of a girl. It's in this first novel that all the key characters, who we will find in the other three, take shape. Here we get to know the protagonist's investigative mettle and methods: investigations conducted with much practical sense, without exacerbated psychologisms on the characters. Interrogations and dialectical speculations are immediately followed by on-site investigations, around Milan: if you are from Milan or know the city, it will be particularly enjoyable to follow and recognize the streets mentioned.
It proceeds like this for the other three novels, but it's a crescendo of brutality and wickedness that opens before our eyes.
The Boys of the Massacre is the power of a perverse and "lost" mind in inciting a group of society's outcasts, the boys of the massacre indeed, to commit a heinous act on the body of a young woman with unheard-of violence.
But we truly descend into the depths of criminal hell, into exploitation and the annihilation of the person in the last novel, perhaps the absolute masterpiece of the saga. Here the evil is truly mean, it's your confidant friend who takes advantage of you, enters your life of pain, but dignified, to push it into hell. Without apparent reason, just to take advantage of the weaker, just to "exploit" pain and distress for profit.
Highly recommended.
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