It’s a special night at the Savoy, one of Milan’s most exclusive hotels: fifty hand-picked guests will have the honor of joining the party thrown by MP Vincenzo Greco to celebrate the end of the EXPO and the start of a massive road project. Right in the middle of the festivities, however, a storm knocks out the lights, and the suite holding the party plunges into darkness. When the lights go back on, there is the politician, dead in the pool. With the security cameras disactivated and cell phones dead, technology is not going to solve this one. Another approach is called for: logic, observation, intuition – the old-school way of investigating. Which is why this highly sensitive case, given the victim, goes to Luca Botero, aka Amish: the technophobe police inspector who lives in a time warp, like he’s back in the 1970s.

A novelist, journalist, and scriptwriter, Paolo Roversi lives in Milan. His two-volume Città rossa about the history of the Milan underworld in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, was published in 2015 by Marsilio: Milano criminale and Solo il tempo di morire (2015 Selezione Bancarella Award, 2015 Garfagnana in giallo Award). The same publisher brought out the series featuring the reporter/hacker Enrico Radeschi, ten novels to date, the most recent being Il pregiudizio della sopravvivenza (2021), L’eleganza del killer (2022), and L’ombra della solitudine (2024). In 2023, Inspector Luca Botero first appeared in Alla vecchia maniera (Mondadori, 2023) along with Scerbenanco entry Una morte onorevole. Previously, in 2020, Roversi’s Psychokiller (SEM) won the Readers’ Prize for the Giorgio Scerbenanco Award. He contributes to newspapers and magazines and has written treatments for TV series and short films. Roversi is the founder and director of the NebbiaGialla Suzzara Noir Festival and the web portal MilanoNera.