Books

It’s a gloomy spring for Chief of Police Arcadipane. Every street, every bar, every restaurant in the city is a reminder. He who has always found opportunity where others give in, but now he is tired; his sharpness seems to have dulled. He is roused from his torpor by a violent incident like so many others. Behind it, however, is concealed an evil so extraordinary, it’s hard to believe.

Vincenze Arcadipane is 55, with a failed marriage behind him and a future that doesn’t promise much. To add to this, he’s now convinced he’s lost the intuition that guided him in his investigations. But when a woman is beaten up outside the metro station in Turin, and the perpetrator tracked down in just a few hours, that intuition tells him something isn’t right about such an easy resolution.

He decides to look into it further, with the help of Corso Bramard, his old boss and mentor, and the troubled agent Isa Mancini: a tried and tested team formed around a strange former police officer with an obsessive streak. Together they will uncover the rules of a wild and lethal game, a descent into the underground world of the Web which, ring after ring, will bring them to where the “things that don’t need to be seen” are handled.

Praise for Una rabbia semplice

‘The thing that bothers me, about Bramard’s and Arcadipane’s stories, is that I didn’t write them myself. Maybe I have never been happy enough to do it. Or sad enough, I am not sure.’
– Alessandro Baricco

‘A rage which is almost still, portrayed with great emotional intensity by Davide Longo, who once again returns to the characters of his recent novels with the simple desire to dig into the soul rather than the blood… Longo’s instinct is that of the pure narrator, the whisperer of emotions.’
– Tuttolibri

‘Davide Longo writes noir. Or maybe not. He writes worlds. He invented a retired policeman called Corso Bramard who is a righteous man, cold, like a sculpture by Giacometti, with the bearing of Clint Eastwood, and another policeman, who is his pupil even if he is 55, called Vincenzo Arcapidane, […] a machine built to function. As one is intellectual, the other one is corporeal. You won’t forget these two (…) Within these books you can find different flavours. (…)The grief for something lost is mixed up with the need to laugh about it (…) Reading these books is an addictive adventure.’
– La Repubblica

‘Una rabbia semplice is a wonderful novel (…) Besides being a good crime novel, it is a beautiful story of people, told from an intimate point of view (…) This is a book full of real things (…) Davide Longo is one of the great ones.’
– Carlo Lucarelli, Il Corriere