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These Dark Things (Captain Natalia Monte, #1)

Jan Merete Weiss

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May 07, 2011 Tony rated it liked it

Somewhere in the opening third of this Naples-set crime series debut, I started to find myself having a hard time not seeing images from the 2008 film Gomorrah. That powerful feature is a vividly bleak picture of contemporary Naples and the stranglehold organized crime has on it, and it's hard to imagine anyone seeing it and not looking at Naples through its grim lens thereafter. While the forces of law were largely absent from the film's storytelling, this slim debut shows us the city through t Somewhere in the opening third of this Naples-set crime series debut, I started to find myself having a hard time not seeing images from the 2008 film Gomorrah. That powerful feature is a vividly bleak picture of contemporary Naples and the stranglehold organized crime has on it, and it's hard to imagine anyone seeing it and not looking at Naples through its grim lens thereafter. While the forces of law were largely absent from the film's storytelling, this slim debut shows us the city through the eyes of a pair of carabinieri assigned to the elite anti-organized crime unit. (The carabinieri occupy a somewhat uneasy middle space in Italian law enforcement: although officially an arm of the military, they serve as a kind of national federal police with a more sweeping powers and scope than local police.)

The story opens with the striking tableau of a beautiful redhead found sitting dead in a tiny church crypt by an old crone working as a traditional bone cleaner -- the initial injection of the steady doses of cultural history that run throughout the book. Carabinieri partners Captain Monte and Seargent Pino are assigned to investigate and soon find connections in the murder to one of the big crime families, several local clergymen, and the smarmy professor who drove Monte from her university studies a decade preciously. Unlike police in most of the West, who are able to investigate without too much concern about the consequences, they are forced to tread lightly when their cases starts to veer into the world of organized crime. As the book makes abundantly clear, it's the crime families who run Naples, and the forces of law and order only serve at their pleasure.

The story takes the reader all across the historic city, from the dangerous Spanish quarter to the upscale nouveau-riche district of Chiaia and into the largely unmapped miles of tunnels, crypts, and caverns hewn into the rock below it. There's even an excursion to the notorious Scampia suburbs north of the city, whose gang-ruled public housing blocks feature prominently in Gomorrah. Meanwhile -- in an obvious metaphor for the mafia influence on civil society -- the story unfolds against the backdrop of streets covered in festering trash, due to gang turf battles over trash-pickup services (which really happened a few years ago).

It all ticks along at a nice brisk pace, and unlike far too many books, it doesn't too much extraneous fat on it (the one exception being a predictable and unnecessary romantic entanglement). And while I quite appreciated that for most of the book, it didn't quite work for the ending. It's one part of the book where the author needed to slow down a touch and let the climax unfold a little more slowly, and instead it has a bit of a rushed, abrupt feel to it. It's a solid debut, not great, but good enough to keep me interested in reading the next in the series, and definitely likely to be of more interest to someone with an interest in Italy. ...more

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Apr 17, 2012 Suzanne marked it as to-read

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