This month's book group read was this Mafia
I crossed out the word thriller above because that's one thing this book definitely isn't. It's a police procedural about the search for the kidnappers and killers of the son of a Mafia boss, but it falls short on the elements that thrill this particular reader.
That's not to say it's a bad book, it just doesn't fit with what I would normally expect from a novel about Mafia hitman and the police.
In 1992, just after the (real life) murder of a prominent judge (who'd recently helped take down one of the largest Mafias in Italy), the son of a Mafia lord in Bari is kidnapped. After the boy's dead body is discovered, despite the ransom being paid, Marshal Fenoglio of the Carabinieri has to track down the killers in the midst of a local mafia war.
All the ingredients are there for a fantastic and exciting cat and mouse chase between killers and targets with our brave hero showing off his skills as a detective.
That's not what we get though. Carofiglio is an ex-prosecutor for organised crime and government advisor on the anti-mafia committee so he knows the subject matter inside out and we can assume that what he's written is probably more realistic. Whether it makes for an exciting read is another question.
I managed to read this book in 3 or four days despite it being 350 pages. It's a very quick and easy read. I was never bored with it, but I do have issues.
There's no mystery element to the story. there's no hints for the reader to second guess the narrative. We're given all the information unambiguously at the same time as the detective character.
At no point in the story does Fenoglio do any detective work. Quite literally, in both of the plotlines- the mafia war and the kidnapped child- one of the bad guys just decides to tell him everything he needs to know. Fenoglio himself does very little indeed to impact the story despite being the central character who's on nearly every page of the book. The closest he gets to detective work is when he takes a comment made by an associate and mentions that to a colleague. The colleague then works out who the bad guys are, and one of them spills the beans on the other. It's the colleague and not Fenoglio who plays a substantial role in bringing the bad guy to justice too.
The pacing is slowed somewhat by sandwiching chapters with plot with chapters where the characters discuss how morally ambiguous policework is. Probably half the book is philosophical musings about what is needed for effective policing.
The most interesting bit of the book is the central sequence where the Mafia guy is telling his story in the form of his police interviews and we learn how a small time thief can rise through the ranks and how Mafia's operate. One of the points made at the book group meeting was how this section feels more horrific because of the matter of fact way that the character talks about truly vicious killings and the correct techniques for disposing of the bodies.
There is an occasional nice turn of phrase and clever description. All in all, I'm glad to have read it, but I'm not going to rush out to buy any of his other books. Despite the mafia being the subject of so much fiction, this book doesn't feel cliched and does feel like it's probably more grounded in reality than some others. Whether achieving that realism by all but ditching the thriller and mystery elements that normally accompany crime fiction is a good thing or not is up for debate.
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