With carofiglio we enjoyed a John Grisham Latin version. And it is that the plots of this Italian writer border that universe of judicial thriller that gives such good results both in the literary and in the cinematographic. Because no story of greater tension than the one that puts you in the shoes of a defendant sitting on the bench. Or that of a victim facing the judicial machinery of a large multinational.
We assume that both authors cited are law scholars, something almost necessary for this type of author. Because they are like chroniclers who are prepared, knowingly, to develop narrative frameworks between the subterfuges of the law. Developing with great detail between court hearings, raising the sophisms of the most wicked lawyers and deploying the maieutics of each lawyer so that their cause wins. In the case of Carofiglio with more force if possible in his capacity as magistrate.
All that remains is to find the basis, the argument, the case. As far as Carofiglio is concerned, we usually find darker, criminal issues that confront us with crime from judicial aspects where the demonstration of guilt worries us and motivates us to continue reading. Because we want the murderer to fall, and we may end up hating whoever is in charge of defending him. As it could not be otherwise in novels set in Italy, the mafias and the underworld also play a leading role, splashing their corruption into all areas.
Top 3 best novels of Gianrico Carofiglio
Involuntary witness
In Carofiglio we can always discover that transcendent intention towards the sociological in each of its plots. On this occasion, the issue of prejudice taken as evidence, racism and the thirst for revenge end up transforming into the very opposite of what justice seeks in its essence.
One of those novels that, based on the powerful magnetism of Justice as an entity that governs ethics with its punitive capacity, represents the margin of error and collateral damage as something fundamentally unacceptable. Little Francesco, nine years old, is found dead at the bottom of a well in the city of Bari. Immediately, investigations blame an undocumented Senegalese man selling trinkets on the beach. The evidence is categorical. It seems evident that he is the author of the crime. The trial will be a simple procedure. The accused, sentenced to life imprisonment. And case closed.
Three o'clock in the morning
A disconcerting novel that escapes from the usual argument of this author to enter an intimate realism with existentialist outbursts about life, love, fatherhood and all those things that appear to us as ghosts in their essence in a cyclical, recurring way, until they can erupt as an inescapable obsession.
“I just turned fifty-one, the age my father was then. I thought it might be a good time to write about those two days and their nights. " The two days and nights referred to by Antonio, the narrator of this story, are those that, just turning eighteen, he spent with his father in Marseille. His childhood had been marked by epilepsy and his family decided to take him to see a doctor in that city who proposed a possible cure with a new medication.
Three years after starting the treatment, Antonio has to return to the city to see if, indeed, he has overcome the disease. This time he is only accompanied by his father - now separated from the mother - and, to assess the cure, the boy must undergo a stress test and, with the help of some pills, remain two days without sleep.
During those long sleepless hours that father and son spend, they wander the city, go to a jazz club, pass through unsavory neighborhoods, take a boat to a local beach, meet two women who invite them to a bohemian party, the boy lives his sexual initiation, the father confesses intimacies and secrets that he had never told him about… And throughout those two days and nights both share unforgettable moments that will mark the narrator's life forever.
A dazzlingly beautiful initiation novel, the title of which is taken from a line from Smooth is Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald: "In the true dark night of the soul it is always three in the morning." Gianrico Carofiglio explores parent-child relationships with a look full of emotion, and captures decisive moments in the formation of the young protagonist, who travels an unknown city with his father and discovers things that he will never be able to forget.
With eyes closed
The emblematic Guido Guerrieri was presented to us as the last link to royal justice in "Involuntary Witness." In this new case, we are presented with another new sociological aspect of burning news, gender violence. The possible impunity of one of these criminals moves us through the plot with that longing for a certain justice that protects the woman from the macho disaster.
Guido Guerrieri is a very special lawyer. After years of defending unpresentable characters and hitting rock bottom in all aspects of his life, Guerrieri, perhaps in search of some modest redemption, begins to work on cases of those that do not bring money or glory, but only new enemies. In Involuntary Witness he was a Senegalese immigrant accused of the brutal murder of a child. In With Eyes Closed, Guerrieri comes across the case of a beaten woman who had the courage to report harassment by her ex-partner. So far, no lawyer wants to represent her for fear of the powerful people involved.
But when a police inspector shows up at his office to ask for his help, and he does so accompanied by Sister Claudia, a nun who, more than a religious, looks like a policewoman, Guido Guerrieri realizes that this may be the most interesting case , and more difficult, of his entire career. Involuntary Witness, the first case of the lawyer Guerrieri, was called "one of the best legal thrillers published in Italy" and started a new chapter in Italian crime literature. With his eyes closed he goes one step further and reveals its author, the anti-mafia judge Gianrico Carofiglio, as one of the most attractive voices of the European black genre.
