Blood Curse

The Commissario Ricciardi Series - Book 2

Blood Curse

By Maurizio de Giovanni
Unabridged
100% overall 1 rating. Go to reviews
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“A pensive and lonely figure, Ricciardi and his uncanny hunches generally earn his colleagues’ mistrust, save for his steadfast champion Maione…Set in Naples in 1931, the story delights in dichotomies: living and departed both crowd the streets, spring arrives in force after a long winter, primal needs determine the lives of the wealthy and working classes alike…The promise that each life will intersect keeps Ricciardi and Maione’s investigation lively.”

Publishers Weekly

Ricciardi has visions. He sees and hears the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths. It is both a gift and a curse. It has helped him become one of the most acute and successful homicide detectives in the Naples police force. But all that horror and suffering has hollowed him out emotionally: He drinks and doesn't sleep. Other than his loyal partner Brigadier Maione he has no friends.

Naples, 1931. In a working-class apartment in the Sanita neighborhood, an elderly woman by the name of Carmela Calise has been beaten to death. When Ricciardi and Maione arrive at the scene they start asking the neighbors questions. No one wants to talk, but slowly a few interesting facts slip out. Carmela Calise was moonlighting as a fortune-teller and moneylender. In her decrepit apartment, she would receive clients—among them some of the city's rich and powerful—predicting their futures in such a way as to manipulate and deceive. If economic ruin lurked in their futures, Calise was happy to help—for a price, of course. She had many enemies: those indebted to her, manipulated by her lies, disappointed by her prophesies, or destroyed by her machinations. Murder suspects in this atmospheric thriller abound, and Commissario Ricciardi, one of the most original and intriguing investigators in contemporary crime fiction, will have his work cut out for him.

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  1. Rogue Writer
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    A New Approach

    Unlike the rest of the Commissario Ricciardi books I’ve listened to, this story didn’t have an overtly common Italian cultural thread running through it, like food or opera. This allows the book to range more openly instead of being restricted by the sometimes contrived-feeling cultural theme that forces so much in the other stories to relate to something like opera or food. Although I miss learning something more about 1930’s Italian culture, I felt this story was better off without the forced cultural theme. In this installment, we get a book with many more possible suspects and characters in general. Without giving away the ending, I appreciate that it didn’t conclude with Ricciardi explaining how he solved the case like some Doyle-era Italian Sherlock Holmes. That said, the twist at the end is satisfying, even if it does seem to come out of nowhere.

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