Nero come la notte

Sergio Stokar was a skilled policeman. Perhaps the most skilled, in that faded but still opulent city in north-east Italy. Until the day he unwittingly trod on the wrong people’s toes and was left half dead at the door of the very last place he would have expected to end up: the Zattere, a complex of abandoned buildings where a community of undocumented immigrants had settled and were living by their own laws. This place, with its delicate and precarious equilibrium,its confusion of languages, races and smells, would in normal circumstances have been a nightmare for someone like Stokar, whose political beliefs were in total harmony with his initials: SS. But it was a nightmare he was forced to inhabit, adapting to new rules and living in a reality that he would once have spurned.So as to remain in safety, Sergio becomes the ‘sheriff of the Zattere’. He maintains order and investigates small crimes. And then one day he’s assigned a special mission by the Council that rules over the complex. Some of the Zattere girls have been killed in a brutal fashion: there’s a murderer lurking somewhere and only a skilled policeman like Stokar can track him down, thanks partly to his intuition and his contacts, but mostly because he’s as stubborn as a steamroller. He finally discovers that there may be just a single investigation and that the horror is hiding in unexpected places and among people who are above suspicion. Everything is joined together by a single thread. A thread that is as black as night, as red as blood. Because in a world that believes only in greed, there is no guilt or innocence – just infinite shades of evil.