title: Death in the High City: A crime novel set in Italy
author: Val Culley
description: Val Culley was a journalist for more than 30 years, working in newspapers, television and PR, until her love of Italy started her writing for magazines and websites about her favourite locations. Vals obsession with Italy combined with her fascination for detective fiction has now led her to write her first novel, Death in the High City. Set in one of Vals favourite places, Bergamo in Lombardia, the novel features detective duo Kate Butler, a freelance journalist, and Steve Bartorelli, a retired Detective Chief Inspector. The first British crime novel to be set in Bergamo, Death in the High City is about the suspicious death of an English woman who was writing a biography of composer Gaetano Donizetti. It will interest readers who enjoy cosy crime fiction or detective novels with an Italian setting. Val lives in Leicestershire with her husband, Jon Culley, a sports writer. They have two grown up children.
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  * * *
  
  **If on a winter's night a traveler**
  
   _Translated from the Italian by William Weaver_
  
  * * *
  
  Copyright © 1979 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino
  
  English translation copyright © 1981
  
  by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
  
  isbn 0-15-143689-4
  
  * * *
  
   _For Daniele Ponchiroli_
  
  * * *
  
  translator's note
  
  In Chapter Eight the passage from
  
   _Crime and Punishment_
  
  is quoted in the beloved translation
  
  of Constance Garnett.
  
   **W.W.**
  
  * * *
  
  Contents
  
  3 1
  
  10 _If on a winter's night a traveler_
  
  25 2
  
  34 _Outside the town of Malbork_
  
  42 3
  
  54 _Leaning from the steep slope_
  
  68 4
  
  77 _Without fear of wind or vertigo_
  
  91 5
  
  103 _Looks down in the gathering shadow_
  
  115 6
  
  132 _In a network of lines that enlace_
  
  140 7
  
  161 _In a network of lines that intersect_
  
  169 8
  
  199 _On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon_
  
  * * *
  
  210 9
  
  221 _Around an empty grave_
  
  234 10
  
  244 _What story down there awaits its end?_
  
  253 11
  
  260 12
  
  * * *
  
  If on a 