“Justice is one thing, law is another.”
Ennio Guarnieri è un poliziotto con un alto senso della giustizia che, dopo aver pestato i piedi a una persona a cui sarebbe stato meglio non farlo, sarà costretto a lasciare la divisa.
Ennio Guarnieri is a policeman with a high sense of justice who, after stepping on the toes of a person it would have been better not to, will be forced to leave his uniform.
The unexpected turning point in his life and daily life will lead Ennio to withdraw into himself, cutting the already feeble bonds of sociality with his few friends and former colleagues.
Just as he finds himself cradling this new vice of all-encompassing loneliness, he is involved in an attempted murder (or at least this is the appearance), which will upset his unscrew for the following weeks in a completely unexpected way.
From the chat with the author in the “Stazione BooktoMi” meetings, we found confirmation of our intuition that for the way it is told, analyzed to the core and finally loved, the pervasive loneliness of the protagonist has been described in the image and resemblance to that of the writer.
The pleasure of being alone is accompanied in the story of Ennio’s high sense of justice, so much so that we think if even in everyday life the two concepts are not correlated, and if the search for the same, even against the law, do not force us to remain alone in the world. It is certainly a theme that will involve our protagonist and that will also make the reader reflect.
As always in our evaluations, the research work done by the author is particularly appreciated, in the description of some legal procedures, the technicality in the use of some weapons, and in the description of the world of the Italian underworld, with ideas for reflections on non-realities. told by the newspapers.
We now come to the key consideration: would we like to recommend reading the book? As far as we are concerned, although we do not have a solid acquaintance with the Noir world, we very much enjoyed reading the novel and, more importantly, it made us want to deepen the genre with the reading of other titles by the same author, but not only.
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Raul Montanari, The vice of loneliness, Baldini+Castoldi, Milano, 2021
