Tu sei il male

(English suggested title: Do not die before dying)
[forthcoming]

From the Italian publisher of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, the first volume of another extraordinary crime trilogy. This is a thriller of rare power and overwhelming intensity.

«An old unsolved murder. A killer reappearing from the past. The bigotism of yesterday and the racism of today that weld in the shadows. Behind each apparent truth, there always hides another. This is Italy, detective Balistreri! And even your sickening strength will never manage to change it» Giancarlo De Cataldo, bestelling author of Romanzo criminale

«Each one of them could have been at my place, that very first time. And it is to them who have lived without remorse, without honor, that I wish to dedicate myself. To one in particular»

Rome, July 11, 1982. On the evening of the Italian victory at the Spanish soccer World Cup, Elisa Sordi, a young employee of a real estate company owned by the Vatican, disappears into thin air. The investigation is headed by Michele Balistreri, a young police detective with a dark past. Arrogant and lazy, Balistreri takes the case lightly, and only when the body of Elisa is found on the banks of the Tiber he throws himself headlong into the investigation. But something goes wrong and the crime remains unsolved.
Rome, July 6, 2006. While the Italian team beats France at the World Cup in Germany, Giovanna Sordi, Elisa’s mother, kills herself by jumping from a balcony. Detective Balistreri, now head of the Special Foreign Section in the Capital, holds off his own demons by force of antidepressants. The suicide of the old woman sharpens his remorse, urging him to reopen the investigation.
But to do justice to Elisa Sordi after twenty-four years will cost him a lot more than expected. Balistreri will have to uncover a truth infinitely worse than the bunch of lies under which it is buried, and to face an Evil as much elusive as tenacious, with multiple faces, one more frightening than the other.
Tu sei il male is a narrative device of diabolical precision that engulfs the reader into a whirlwind of revelations and plot twists that it is impossible to escape, but it is also a novel capable of throwing a clear light on the conflicts that afflict our society and of setting up a non-trivial reflection on how thin is the line separating good from evil, the guilty from the innocent

Movie and TV rights already optioned

About the Author
Roberto Costantini (Tripoli, 1952), engineer and business consultant, is now a manager of the LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome where he also teaches at the Master in Business Administration. This is his debut novel, the first volume of a trilogy starring Michele Balistreri.

Available product forms