A new case for private investigator Elia Contini, who works between northern Italy and Switzerland. A detective novel in which suspense and turns of events are cleverly intertwined with an ironic reflection on human passions and vulnerability.

Contini is called to take on the case of a disappearance that goes back twenty years; in 1998 Eugenio Torres, a famous doctor who loved trekking and promoted hospitals in Niger disappeared during a trek in the Swiss mountains. Now his children want to find out what really happened. One day, a young migrant arrives in Switzerland from the Nigerian Sahara, claiming that he has proof Torres is still alive and in need of help.
An odd pair of investigators is formed: the Swiss detective and the man from the desert. As they investigate the past, they are lead to Torres’s best friend who confesses to having killed him out of jealousy in 1998 and to having thrown him in a gorge in a rocky area. How can it be then, that today Eugenio Torres is signalling his presence, as if he were still alive?

Previous titles of the Contini’s series:
L’uomo senza casa/The Homeless Man (2008); La sparizione/The Disappearance (2010); Il giudice e la rondine/The Judge and the Swallow (2014); L’arte del fallimento/The Art of Failure (2016).

pp.288

In this new noir adventure, private investigator Elia Contini has to act within the shady world of border workers between Italy and Switzerland, in a borderland where not only a terrible murder has taken place, but where an incident of oppression and a scandal linked to the exploitation of workers also develops.

Every morning at dawn, men and women cross the border between Italy and Switzerland to go to work. They’re called frontalieri – border workers – and there are tens of thousands of them. One of them is Ernesto Magni. All goes well in the beginning, but then, between being fired and getting a divorce, his life takes a turn for the worse until one morning, on the train, he is robbed of his wallet. Ernesto is distressed, even though no one understands why. What did the wallet contain that was so valuable? Ernesto doesn’t tell anyone anything, but he is clearly frightened. He turns to Elia Contini, a small private investigator. What looked like an easy investigation, almost a formality to reassure Ernesto, soon turns into a nightmare. Ernesto is violently murdered and a whole a scandal involving the exploitation of workers slowly comes to light. Contini has to act in the world of border workers and entrepreneurs, and discovers that even nowadays, like throughout the history of humanity, a border sparks uncertainty, chaos and violence.

pp.320