Books

September 2008. In the countryside near Turin, the bones of twelve men and women are discovered, all of them slaughtered and buried in a mass grave.

Arcadipane is the Turin detective who arrives first on the scene. But the next morning, a task force specialising in mass graves from the Second World War is already in place to look after the investigation. But something doesn’t feel right: one of the femurs shows signs of an operation that probably took place in the Seventies. That femur is the start of an investigation Arcadipane will undertake by means that are anything but official, which will force him to look into an old news story: a fire at one of the offices of a neo-fascist political party, in 1974, in which an activist was killed.

The young agent assigned to that case was Bramard, the man who, a few years later, would become Arcadipane’s boss, mentor and friend. And so, these two men who are so very different, but united in their intuition, their need for truth and their air of disenchantment are brought together once more to uncover an underground conspiracy whose proportions seem inconceivable in a civil, democratic society. An attempt to change the political course of the nation which was silenced and buried. What will be the cost of bringing it to light? And is it really a secret? Or something that many people know about, but don’t want to face up to?

This Is How Young Beasts Play is a political noir, a mystery that revolves around twelve deaths that took place at the height of the political tensions in the Seventies, but also a book of bitter irony and even humour.