Sometimes you go back home for love; other times, because you have to. There are cases of people’s roots calling them back, or those roots turn into the only refuge there is. Especially if it’s 1940, Italy is at war, and your family’s roots happen to be Jewish. So begins a new chapter for Inspector Ricciardi, juggling the funk he is in, the fears he has, and the innocent, dreamy gaze of his daughter. Fortino, the town where he was born, might be the perfect place to keep safe and find some peace, together with his daughter and his in-laws, but it will be right on his property that the past will come knocking and he’ll have to come to terms with it. The inspector’s personal history is now entwined with history with a capital ‘h’, in a novel that paints a broad canvas, packed with memories, courage, hope, and not least, resistance.

In 2007 Maurizio De Giovanni attracted the attention of Italy’s literary scene after winning an award, thanks to a novel set in Naples in the 1930s, featuring a police commissioner, Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi: Il senso del dolore (I Will Have Vengeance). Thus began his highly popular series that counts fifteen novels to date, with the latest, Volver, plus several stories in the short story collections Giochi criminali (Einaudi, 2014), L’omicidio Carosino. Le prime indagini del commissario Ricciardi (Centoautori, 2017), and L’ultimo passo di tango (Rizzoli, 2017). The equally popular TV series based on the Ricciardi novels aired on Raiuno for two seasons. In 2012, De Giovanni won the Scerbanenco Award for The Crocodile (Mondadori), which introduced Inspector Lojacono, a protagonist of another hit book series as well, set in contemporary Naples: The Bastards of Pizzofalcone. This last added a new chapter in 2024: Pioggia per i bastardi di Pizzofalcone, and it also became a popular TV series starring Alessandro Gassmann and Carolina Crescentini. With a more recent novel, Sara al tramonto, De Giovanni created another character, a former secret service agent, now retired, with the gift of invisibility and a talent for stealing people’s secrets. By 2023, this series was now six titles strong, with Sorelle. Una storia di Sara, and will soon get the Netflix treatment and turn into a series starring Teresa Saponangelo and Claudia Gerini. And lately the author has enriched his Mina Settembre series with the fourth and fifth installment, Troppo freddo per Settembre and Una sirena a Settembre, both published by Einaudi, while the first three novels came out with Sellerio. There are myriad comics and graphic novels based on the author’s works. Since 2017, Sergio Bonelli Editore has published ten comic books based on the Inspector Ricciardi novels and five annual magazines with unpublished stories. The same publisher has brought out four comics devoted to The Bastards of Pizzofalcone novels, and in October 2024 also published the collection Il segreto di Martina e altre storie.