In this instalment in the crime series featuring the Monteverde Five: the police officers in the quiet Roman district of the same name, united by their frailties and their impressive investigative skills.

The Monteverde Five, led by Chief Inspector Ansaldi, are at grips with an apparent suicide that will turn out to be thorny, to say the least, because of its connection with politics.

Chief Inspector Ansaldi is an excellent police officer, even if he has for some time suffered from hypochondria and anxiety attacks that make even the simplest activities challenging, in his life as well as his work. Fortunately, Monteverde, the district to which he has been assigned, is an oasis of peace amid the chaos of Rome: a quiet place where nothing ever happens. That may be why four “peculiar” individuals have been placed under his command. They are the Monteverde Five: men and women grappling with their weaknesses, but, together, able to turn them into strengths. One Friday afternoon, a lonely, widowed octagenarian is found dead in his apartment, a noose around his neck. It looks like an easy case, a classic suicide. But something doesn’t quite add up in the eyes of Ansaldi and his team, and, in just a few days, this minor suspicion develops into an investigation that upsets not only the peace of Monteverde but also that of the corridors of power.

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The Monteverde Five are back with a race against time to solve a new case: the murder of a prostitute in one of Rome’s most typical, beautiful parks, just when the world’s attention is focused on the Italian capital.

The large park of Villa Pamphili, a stone’s throw from the Vatican and Monteverde, has two very different sides: by day it’s a park with children, elderly people and people practising sports; by night it turns into an illegal refuge for the homeless, drug addicts and prostitutes. At dawn on a chilly January morning, a prostitute is found dead, brutally murdered with a blade. She was Italian, a little over twenty, a young woman alone who prostituted herself in order to suppert herself at university. The murder has taken place at the worst possible time, two weeks before an important political summit involving the main European heads of state, and with all eyes focused on Rome. Whether or not there is a connection between the two events, a terrible race against time has just begun for the chief inspector.

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The Monteverde Five’s first case, delving not only into the depths of a criminal mind, but into our entire society, which conceals its most ruthless instincts in full view.

During a sweltering Roman summer, in the Monteverde district, the amputated limbs of a man are found arranged in the pattern of a well-known physics formula. The brutal murder disturbs the peace of the area and, above all, upsets the precarious balance of Chief Inspector Ansaldi, who, by being transferred to the capital, had hoped for a respite from the horrors he witnessed during his long career in the police. Meticulous and sensitive, his great humanity makes him prone to anxiety and panic attacks. Despite that, he is always an uncompromising professional who never shies away from duty: he will find the killer, no matter what it costs him. But first he must work out how to create a team spirit with the officers in his investigation squad, who are as frail as he is. Together, they will become the Monteverde Five.

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