Fiori mortali

• A story set shortly after the end of the Second World War, in a still suffering Milan. However, death seems to have no intention of leaving the city…• Jewellery, poisons, unscrupulous characters: these are the main ingredients of a tale full of mystery, enhanced by unsettling illustrations.Milan, 1946. The Second World War has been over for a year, and one would think that everyone had had enough of death. But no. For some, killing is a job and jewellery-making a passion. Or vice versa. Anyway, it is something that can attract rich ladies before having their husbands bury them. Or vice versa, because when it comes to deceiving and murdering, our man makes no distinction between genders. He is anonymous, opaque, invisible: quite the opposite of a beautiful piece of jewellery or a promise of love. Like the city that hosts him, his name is also surrounded by a curtain of fog, so much so that no one remembers him. Everyone knows him as the jeweller of Maggiolina. And it is in this man, as mysterious as he is ambitious, that a mother and a twelve years-old son run into. They have lost their husband and father, they still have a house and a tailor’s shop to run, and many girls who rely on that salary.The mother and son would just like to live peacefully, perhaps spend a nice evening at La Scala, hastily rebuilt to give a sign of hope to the Milanese who have suffered so much: hunger, fear and bombs. Someone, however, has other plans. Plans to get their hands on the business, on the house, on those naive girls full of dreams. Plans as brilliant as a diamond flower and as dangerous as a drop of poison…