title: Crimini: The Bitter Lemon Book of Italian Crime Fiction
author: Giancarlo De Cataldo
description: As De Cataldo, an appellate judge, points out in his pithy preface, corruption is a theme shared by all nine stories in this first U.S. anthology of Italian noir. The dark farce, "You Are My Treasure Chest" by Niccolo Ammaniti and Antonio Manzini, recounts the misadventures of drug-addicted plastic surgeon Paolo Bocchi, who finds a creative solution to hiding a stache of cocaine when he must perform breast-enhancement surgery on one of Italy's leading soap opera actresses. Carlo Lucarelli's lean "The Third Shot," the volume's most impressive entry, centers on an officer-involved shooting in Bologna. Expectations are confounded when the threat from organized crime in Massimo Carlotto's "Death of an Informer" stems not from the Mafia but from Chinese gangs who have taken over the protection rackets in small towns the Italian mobsters have abandoned. As Carlotto's story suggests, the increasing role of immigrants in Italian society has become a major theme in Italian noir. The high quality and variety of these tales will leave many readers hoping for another such selection soon. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Advance Praise for
  
  
  Upon This Rock
  
  
  “Perry has written an elegant, twisty thriller in which a gay couple
  investigates a mysterious suicide in a scenic Italian hill town. It’s not hard
  to imagine that this book could do for Orvieto what _Midnight in the Garden of
  Good and Evil_ did for Savannah.”
  
  
  — **Armistead Maupin** , author of the internationally acclaimed _Tales of the
  City_
  
  
  “ _ **Upon This Rock**_ is for those readers who love Italy and who love crime
  fiction. David Perry evokes the spirit of the ancient Italian town of Orvieto,
  in a 21st-century thriller that takes in several centuries of history.”
  
  
  — **Lucinda Hawksley**. author of _Dickens’s Artistic Daughter, Katey_
  
  
  “The gay _DaVinci Code_ , but a lot better.”
  
  
  —Fenton Johnson, Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning author of _The Man Who
  Loved Birds_ ; _Scissors, Paper, Rock_ ; and _At the Center of All Beauty:
  Solitude and the Creative Life_
  
  
  “You will not be able to put this book down. It is page-t