On St. Nicholas’ day, at night in the old part of Bari, a young woman just over twenty is found dead. It’s a violent crime, with the bizarre detail that the mangled corpse is surrounded by toys, baby bottles and baby clothes that suggest children were present and have now vanished. Inspector Gerri Esposito arrives at the scene of the crime. The whole investigation takes just a few bitterly cold days as Bari and all of Puglia get hit by a freak blizzard that then turns to rain. Once again, childhood has been violated - a childhood that Gerri has to piece together and retrieve from the store of his own repressed memories.

Giorgia Lepore (Martina Franca, 1970), lives in the city of her birth and teaches art history at the Liceo da Vinci in Fasano. An archaeologist and art historian, with experience on archaelogical digs, she first tried her hand at fiction in 2009, with the historical novel L’abitudine al sangue. She published I figli sono pezzi di cuore in 2015 and the following year Angelo che sei il mio custode, which introduces the police inspector from Bari, Gregorio Gerri Esposito, and won the Mariano Romiti Prize in 2017.