Via Delle Oche

At the end of "The damned Season," the question seemed to be: "will Commissario De Luca survive?" We get the answer at the start of this work. Yes. Now, the question is, will Italy survive? At least as a viable democracy. As the story begins, in 1948 Bologna, De Luca has been rehabilitated and returned to police work. Only now he is assigned to the Vice Squad! Instead of homicides, he is now supposed to make sure that the legal brothels, and their employees, have all their papers in order. It takes no time at all before a male employee of a brothel is found hanging from a rope, an apparent suicide. Or is he? If so, why doesn't the physical evidence support such a conclusion? And why are all the other staff at Via Delle Oche quickly scattered all over Italy? De Luca is too good a cop to let these questions go unanswered. His quest for the truth will once again make him vulnerable to the machinations of both the left and right in an Italy trying to create some sort of stability, as the powerful forces of politcs, and religion struggle for hegemony' Although he solves the murder, De Luca seems likely to discover the truth of the maxim, "no good deed goes unpunished." De Luca may face a harsher fate than the exposed killer!

Police Commisario (Inspector) De Luca is one of those cops who would like nothing more than to be left along to do his job. He doesn't care much for politics on a global or national scale and doesn't really want to play the sort of political games that could facilitate a cop's climb up the career ladder. But De Luca lives in a turbulent place (Bologna, Italy) during turbulent times (WWII and its immediate aftermath) and the fact that De Luca wants no part of politics does not mean that politics and intrigue won't plague him as he goes about his business. The result has been a trilogy of books that have provided entertaining police stories while at the same time painting a pretty detailed picture of what life may have been like in post-war northern Italy. "Via Delle Oche" is the final volume in what has come to be known as "The De Luca Trilogy". The trilogy is set in northern Italy and takes us from the closing days of WWII, (Carte Blanche (De Luca Trilogy 1)) to the turbulent years immediately after the war (The Damned Season (De Luca Trilogy 2)) until 1948, the current volume, where a critical post-war national election is at hand. The cold war is raging in Europe and the election is thought to be a critical battlefield. Consequently, the Church, the powerful Italian Communist Party, and various secular partisan political groups engage in the sort of intrigue that would make Machiavelli proud. This election is of no immediate professional consequence for De Luca since he is now, upon his return to Bologna from `exile' in Damned Season, assigned to the vice squad. De Luca doesn't seem to mind the demotion all that much as it keeps him outside the political battles that effect the police force as much as any other Italian institution. But the fates and a murder in a bordello on the Via Delle Oche conspire to put De Luca back where he least wants to be: in the limelight walking a political tightrope. The strength of "Via Delle Oche" lies in Lucarelli's ability to paint a pretty realistic-feeling portrait of postwar northern Italy in the years immediately after WWII. I got a real sense of time and place while reading these books. Apart from De Luca, Lucarelli does not invest a lot of time in presenting us with a full-blown character analysis of the key parties to the crime and its aftermath. We also don't get a lot of the internal life of De Luca but De Luca's actions tend to speak for themselves and over the course of the books I got a nice feel for his personality without having had Lucarelli spell it out for me. Although the stories themselves are self-contained I think that the De Luca Trilogy needs to be read in sequence. By the time I came to "Via Delle Oche" the character of Commisario De Luca has been fully formed and the reader will miss out on a lot of context if they have not read the first two volumes. I enjoyed all three books. All in all Via Delle Oche was a filling end to the De Luca trilogy. Recommended. L. Fleisig

First Sentence: From the wall a giant Cossack was watching him with a fierce look in his eyes, a bearskin adorned with the red star on his head, and a bayonet between his teeth, one eye deformed by an air bubble trapped beneath the paper. It's 1948, Italy is recovering after the way and Comm. De Luca is a cop assigned to vice in Bologna. Within days, there have been four closely related murders that no one particularly wants him to investigate. But no matter the division to which he's assigned, De Luca will never turn his back on bringing a killer to justice. This may have been a novella, but it was fully packed. Lucarelli conveys the instability and uncertainty of the time as a backdrop to a classic police procedural. We don't know a lot about De Luca except the single most important fact: he is a cop, no matter the political pressures being brought to bear. At the same time, he is certainly human in his problems with eating, insomnia and his trademark trench coat. I'm sorry there are only the three books and I'd love to know more about where De Luca goes from here. Italophiles, those interested in this period of history and those who like a good police procedural should enjoy this.

Carlo Lucarelli taps into the deep well of Italian cynicism for this continuing saga of Commissario De Luca, the last honest cop in the country, as the parties of the Left and Right duke it out in an apparently meaningless contest for power. Against that political backdrop, Lucarelli spins a credible murder mystery that centers on the "honest prostitutes" working the city of Bologna. Italy in 1948 was a tough neighborhood for anyone trying to get on with a normal life after many years of the Fascist regime and five years of the war. Lucarelli is terrific at giving the reader a realistic look at the environment of the time. "Via Delle Oche" is the third book in this series now in translation and print by Europa Editions. "Carte Blanche" and "The Damned Season" chronicle earlier adventures of the indefatigable Commissario De Luca and are well worth reading.