The reason why I picked up A Quiet Death in Italy is entirely due to its setting. I've been "traveling" around Italy, solving mysteries one after the other, but I had yet to sample one set in Bologna. I thought it was time to "visit" a new location.

The portrait resident Tom Benjamin paints of Bologna is one of unrest caused by some of the usual suspects: corrupt police, corrupt government officials, and greedy property developers, with the added flavor of very vocal and active radical protesters. Some of the scenes set during protests were very well-written, making me feel as though I were right in the streets with the main character.

Former investigative journalist and widower Daniel Leicester is a British ex-pat living in Bologna with his young daughter and working for his father-in-law as a private investigator. He has a very strong sense of right and wrong and is willing to stand up for his principles-- but not at the expense of his common sense. When you're a single parent of a young child, you do have to draw a line somewhere, and I was happy to see that Leicester could make this distinction.

As well-written as A Quiet Death in Italy is, and as much as I learned about present-day Bologna, the story and its main character never really captured my interest or my imagination. Your mileage may certainly vary, so if you're looking for a mystery set in a different Italian location, you may definitely want to give this book a try. ( )

'The door opened onto a small park. I shouldn't have been surprised - the city was built around its hidden spaces.'

A promising start to what will be, hopefully, a series. Our setting is Bologna: 'not only La Grassa, the fat, and La Dotta, the learned, but also, La Rossa, the Red.' Set against the backdrop of the famous university and an old town desperate to reinvent, and renovate, itself for the tourist market, it is also a city where the past lives on, in this shape of its partisan and Communist past which cast a shadow over the events in the novel.

Our intrepid PI, Daniel Leicester, is an Englishman who married his Italian wife Lucia, with whom they had a daughter Rose. Now a widow, Daniel works with his father-in-law Giovanni, Bolgna's ex-police chief, still well-regarded enough to be called the Comandante. Their company, Faidate Investigations, is hired by the wife of the mayor to look into the suspicious death of a local activist, Paolo Solitudine, which opens up a whole can of worms. As Daniel battles to find the truth he has to deal with police and political corruption, an angry gang of protestors and the long shadow of 1970s Italian politics.

This is a thoroughly engaging and well crafted crime thriller. The setting is certainly authentic, and adds a layer of reality and atmosphere to the events; the characters, outside the stock two-dimensional cops and hoodlums, are well rounded and add a very personal touch to Daniel's investigations. He is a very human central character, suitably flawed and emotionally damaged, but a loving father and dutiful family man. His status as both an outsider and a man with Italian family puts him in a certain position:
'An English detective in Italy has certain advantages. For a start, Italians adore the British - or rather, at least until they made a hash of Brexit - deeply admired them for representing everything they believe they are not: sober, pragmatic and trustworthy.'
The first-person narrative also brings the reader closer to Daniel, through whose eyes we see events and make the connections as he does.

Sometimes you just need a good escape into a crime novel, with a suitably foreign setting as a backdrop, and a nice tying up of loose ends for a conclusion. There is plenty here to look forward to more in the series, and I can't wait. Thoroughly recommended. ( )