Poisonville

by Massimo Carlottto & Marco Videtta

Translated from the original Italian by

Antony Shugaar

Poisonville is noir par excellence—there’s murder, moral ambiguity, and a less than heroic main character. In this bestselling novel, however, the real killer is not an individual but an entire system.

The heavily industrialized northeast, Italy’s richest region, is undergoing dramatic change. It once drove the nation’s economic boom—a regional superpower, affluent and arrogant, a land that abided only its own rules. But then the factory owners began moving their operations across the border to former Soviet countries where labor was cheap and regulatory bodies all but absent. With the factories closed and the jobs gone, new elements insinuated themselves into the old system, and the Brahmin families of the northeast began employing increasingly violent methods to protect their wealth. Once renowned for its economic might, the region is now known for trafficking every imaginable commodity, media personalities and politicians on the payrolls of oligarchs and mobsters, and its ongoing environmental catastrophe.

Welcome to Poisonville! Here, the young lawyer Francesco, heir to the region’s second richest family, will have to decide between business as usual or a violent rupture with the ways of the past. The wrong choice could cost him his life.

(From Publisher).
 

Massimo Carlotto was born in Padua, Italy, and now lives in Sardinia. In addition to the many titles in his extremely popular Alligator series, he is also the author of The Fugitive, Death's Dark Abyss, and most recently, Northeast.

One of Italy's most popular authors and a major exponent of the Mediterranean Noir novel, Carlotto has been compared with many of the most important American hardboiled crime writers. His novels have been translated into many languages, enjoying enormous success outside of Italy, and several have been made into highly acclaimed films.

Marco Videtta is a well-known screenwriter and the author of several successful Italian television series. Poisonville is his first novel.