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by Magdalena Nabb Italy has multiple police forces, with some overlap. The Marshal of the title is with the Carabinieri, a special branch of the army which is also responsible for civilian criminal investigations. Marshal Salvo Guarnaccia is a gentle, rather inarticulate, family man, with bulging eyes and an ox-like figure that people tend to assume reflects his thought processes. That’s unfair. While even he himself admits that he’s not particularly quick, like the tortoise outracing the hare in the end, he wins out over those superficially more clever because of the way he notices things and the way his steadily marching thoughts refuse to let go of even minor inconsistencies until he has sorted them out. Still, he’s entirely content in the investigation of petty crime in the neighborhood around his station in Florence, Italy’s Pitti Palace, with major problems like murder referred to Headquarters. And that’s exactly what he assumes will happen when one of his staff stumbles upon some body parts while investigating a traffic obstruction. The shock of being told instead that he’s more than capable of handling such an investigation himself gets explained when he finds out exactly what sort of hot potato this particular victim is. A hot potato that will take the Marshal as far outside his normal world as I, an American reader, find myself while following him around his Florentine home. The multiple threads of the story, from Guarnaccia’s own problems with his younger son to the eventual story behind those body parts, seem very different, but all tie together around the knots that can get created in relationships. Particularly relationships between parents and children. The result is a fascinating look at Italian life and society through the eyes of someone who is both an insider and, because of a combination of profession and natural inclination, an outside observer. This is a beautifully written story filled with a wide range of varied, three dimensional characters, anchored on rock solid, carefully crafted plotting and a vividly depicted setting. You are there, watching it all through the Marshal’s eyes, slightly bewildered by it all but turning, turning, turning the puzzle pieces until they finally fit together and the picture becomes clear. Highly recommended. |
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The Marshal's Own Case