FICTION

Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri
Scribner. Feb. 2018. 464p. tr. from Italian by Anthony Shugaar. ISBN 9781501174650. $28; ebk. ISBN 9781501174674. F
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There's one place worse than prison—the Box, a concrete cube without windows. No one comes out alive, no one that is until the Girl, the silent one covered in blood. And then—who knows how much later or why?—a train from Milan arrives in Rome with a carriage full of dead passengers. ISIS claims responsibility, or so someone wants the police to think. Believing otherwise are Deputy Chief Colomba Caselli and her friend Dante Torre, kidnapped as a child and held for 13 years in a concrete silo (see Kill the Father, the first novel in the Caselli-Torre series), a man with a brilliant mind but always on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. Clues point to a vicious assassin suffering from Cotard delusion (in which the sufferer thinks he is already dead), an angel of death who kills in bulk to hide the intended victim.
VERDICT Dazieri, author of numerous novels and screenplays, knows how to entertain, though sometimes the comic book effects, a bit Grand Guignol, occasion laughter. Damaged characters struggle amid blood, guts, and vomit to discover the truth behind horrific events dating back to the Cold War and Pavlovian experimentation. Will appeal to fans of Jo Nesbø and Italian noir.
Reviewed by Ron Terpening, formerly with Univ. of Arizona, Tucson , Feb 02, 2018
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