Poisonville »

Massimo Carlotto was born in Padua, Italy. He is the author of The Goodbye Kiss (nominated for the Mystery Writers of America's prestigious Edgar Allan Poe award), Death's Dark Abyss, and The Fugitive, an autobiographical account of his time on the run after being falsely accused of murder. He is one of Italy's most popular authors and a major exponent of the Mediterranean noir novel.

Marco Videtta is a well-known screenwriter and the author of several successful Italian television series. Poisonville, written with Massimo Carlotto, is his first novel. He is the author of a new novel, an historical noir entitled Un bell'avvenire.

Poisonville is a noir thriller par excellence-there's murder, moral ambiguity, and a protagonist less than heroic. In this #1 bestselling noir novel, however, the killer is not an individual but an entire system.

The heavily industrialized northeast, Italy's richest region, is undergoing dramatic change. It once drove the nation's economic boom, a regional superpower, affluent and arrogant, a land that abided only its own rules. But then the factory owners began moving their operations east, across the border to former soviet countries where labor was cheap and regulatory bodies absent. With the factories, the jobs, and the riches gone, new elements began insinuating themselves into the old system, and the Brahmin families of the northeast began employing increasingly violent methods to protect their status and their wealth. Once renowned for its economic might, the region is now infested by organized crime, trafficking of every commodity, including human, ranks of media personalities and politicians on the payrolls of rich families and mobsters, and an ongoing environmental catastrophe.

Welcome to Poisonville! Here, the young lawyer Francesco, heir to the region's second richest family, will have to decide between business as usual or a violent rupture with the ways of the past. The wrong choice could cost him his life.

Publishers Weekly

Northeast Italy’s industrial pollution provides the backdrop for Carlotto (The Goodbye Kiss) and screenwriter Videtta’s outstanding fable of greed, corruption and moral abandonment. Filled with echoes of Dante’s Inferno, the book centers on the murder of Giovanna Barovier, a young attorney interning on the staff of respected lawyer Antonio Visentin, within days of her marriage to Visentin’s son, Francesco. Cheap Chinese imports and Italian industries exiled to former Soviet-bloc countries have led to a national downward spiral into dissolution paralleled and individualized by Francesco’s private search for Giovanna’s killer. First finding himself accused of a crime of passion, Francesco soon descends through level after level of human depravity, from theft and brutality through fraud to betrayals so heinous they shatter the soul. Truly little hope if any exists for those who enter this vicious journey into the abyss of human evil. (Oct.)