Commissario Ricciardi is a cop in 1930s Naples, and in the final volume of his indispensable tetralogy of seasons, it’s autumn and the mood is dark and relentlessly rainy and not the cliched image the reader normally has of the Italian south by a long stretch of the imagination. The body of a young orphan is found and yet again Ricciardi communes with the dead in an almost supernatural manner in his dogged efforts to uncover the many questions surrounding the sad case. While doing this he has to juggle with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the police force, the underlying rise of fascism and his own romantic would be entanglements. A terribly endearing hero and a humdinger of a mystery with a heart.
