Schiavone returns with Christmas Investigation

(By Laura Valentini) ANTONIO MANZINI 'UNDER LIE' SPOGLIE' (SELLERIO, PP 560, 17 EURO) - After Halloween and the Trick and treat made in the USA had also arrived in Aosta under the holidays "the turn of the choirs: Saxons, Celtic, Scandinavians or whatever Nordic population had them created". This makes Deputy Commissioner Rocco Schiavone nervous even if his friend Furio reminds him on the phone that even Santa Christmas is not an Italian thing: before the war "in Rome there was "The Befana and that's it". A Christmas atmosphere of lights and gifts that gets on the nerves of the protagonist of the last novel of the series literary work that Antonio Manzini dedicates to the most beloved vice-questor from the Italians: it's called 'Undercover' and has center an increasingly shady and melancholic Schiavone but still endowed with that disenchantment which makes him put the omnipresent pop tunes also played at the Pila cable car, Last Christmas by Wham! and All I want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey, at the "eighth level of the breakup scale" balls" with the temptation "to promote her to ninth". Plus it's freezing cold, which Schiavone, faithful to the character of a Roman from Trastevere transplanted to the mountains, faces with the suede boots and the loden that stubbornly prefers to the duvet. As he is about to let himself go to the melancholy of a ghost, that of his wife Marina, who does not he is seen more, news of a bank robbery arrives. booty is apparently slim and as in a game of mirrors between hostages and robbers an unexpected escape takes by surprise Rocco: who by his own admission is "grudging" and therefore insists on investigating and as usual gets to the bottom of it. the pace becomes fast and the protagonist has little space to look inside yourself also because when you do it you feel an emptiness unsustainable': "He saw his life as a slide, he followed to slide on it but not by will, by inertia", he notes Manzini. Some of his friends, like the commissioner of the scientist Michela Gambino and pathologist Alberto Fumagalli encourages him to go forward, perhaps taking a last chance chance of reciprocated love. But he resists. Complicated things but, at least apparently, separate from each other. discovery of a corpse in a mountain lake, on the road to Cervinia. Who is this man and why was he killed? chains that wrap around his feet with weights do not leave doubts, it was not an accident. It is suspected at first that it was an important chemist disappeared. As often happens, in a game of mirrors, a more complex story comes to light. At the center Big Pharma, sports, business, big crime and all the ways, the the vicissitudes and unpredictable connections in which Rocco Schiavone once again he is forced to investigate. They help him, in this new adventure that requires some quick and irregular hands in plus, the lifelong friends, Brizio and Furio, but also the brains of the police with whom the deputy commissioner has now become accustomed that goes beyond work, Michela and Alberto, now a couple close-knit family whose dinners with expert winemakers Schiavone knows a new friend.