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Books, films & TV


Cristina Rava

180 pages

A Sea of Silence"(Garzanti, 2012) represented the début as a detective of Ardelia Spinola, a Genovese pathologist and the start of a new series.

"Behind the Black of the Night" is the second case of the irresistible Ardelia and her curious friends!

Albenga, a Saturday afternoon in July: strong horizontal showers, like jets from a hose, driven by a fierce wind. Streaks of lightning and blasts of deafening thunder. Gutters overflowing, water pouring down from the cornices, rushing down the streets plunging the old town into a gloom haunted by wandering ghosts. A sudden black-out and the only sounds are the hawling of the wind and the drumming of the heavy rain.

As the pathologist Ardelia Spinola falls asleep over the book she cannot read in the darkness, a man dies just a short distance from her home, in a lift which nobody uses at weekends.

When the pathologist is called to examine the corpse she discovers that the gunshot wound had been cleaned and bandaged - so the victim wasn’t shot in the place where he was found

The lift is in the Palazzo Oddo, a XVIIth century old palace, now a cultural centre and public library.

The victim is, in fact, the head librarian: Ludovico Drovetti, an eminent professor of French and German, a philologist and an expert in Medieval literature with long experience abroad. A curriculum disproportionate to his job.

Ardelia is fascinated by the man’s past, and she makes the investigation her own , as always when events touch some secret internal chords.

Two pillars of support in this new case: one, her friend the magistrate Ugo Bottini, and the other her invincible, stubborn, feminine intuition. But this time there finds even more help in the form of a bee-keeper and herbalist living in the seclusion of the mountains, among his plants and bees … and his very valuable books.