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Location: Blogs365 BlogsBob Gelm's 365 Book Reviews    
Posted by: bryce 8/7/2008 2:19 PM
This is a coincidence. In the last issue, we looked at the latest piece of fiction by Douglas Preston, and in this issue we look at his latest piece of non-fiction, called The Monster of Florence. Normally I wouldn’t do two books in a row by the same author but this book is so compelling, horrific and well-written that I couldn’t help myself.

Mr. Preston is a good writer. His fiction is a little over the top but there is an escapist bent to it that is very appealing. He is an even better non-fiction writer. Up to this point, all of his nonfiction has been published in magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Smithsonian and National Geographic -- not exactly hack-publishing periodicals.

Evidently, Mr. Preston had spent some time in Italy and fell in love with the country, so much so that he made plans to live there with his family at some point in his life. He intended to write another novel, which he had outlined and researched. In August of 2000 he and his family moved to a small stone farmhouse just outside Florence. He settled in to write the text of his novel. His books are best-sellers in Italy, so word gets around that a famous American author is living in the area. One thing leads to another and he meets an Italian journalist named Mario Spezi, who proceeds to tell Mr. Preston of an incident that happened, literally, in the backyard of the very farmhouse in which Mr. Preston and his family were living.

Two young lovers were enjoying each other in the woods in back of the farmhouse. They were brutally murdered, the girl horrifically mutilated. They were but two of the twelve to sixteen murders attributed to a serial killer who came to be called the Monster of Florence. Mr. Spezi just happened to be the journalist most familiar with the case and he claimed that the Monster of Florence was still at large even though the Italian police had arrested, tried and convicted a man they claimed was the perpetrator. Well, that’s not quite accurate. The Italian police had tried and convicted a succession of three men they assured the public had committed these crimes. Then, when another murder was committed the police were forced to let them go.

The two men decide to collaborate, first on an article for The Atlantic, and ultimately a book which was published in Italy and from which the American edition, The Monster of Florence, was derived. This book is just as bizarre and twisted as any fictional serial killer murder mystery. Nonetheless it’s much more interesting because it is all true.

However, I’m tempted to say that it’s not the killer that I find so fascinating as much as the group of police agencies charged with apprehending the Monster. You simply will not believe how they go about trying to catch the murderer, and what happens to Mr. Preston and Mr. Spezi at the hands of these investigators is so convoluted that I don’t think a fiction writer could have made it up. What the Italian police accuse the two writers of is nothing short of idiotic, reckless, and so completely irresponsible that it is really almost impossible to comprehend that it actually happened. Unfortunately, mostly for the Italian people these nitwits were supposed to protect, it did. Buy the book and find out. That alone is worth the price of admission because I’m not going to reveal it here.

There were at least three Italian police agencies involved in the investigation. They all, individually and in consort, make the Keystone Cops look like the best police unit this side of the Mossad. Shot through with political infighting, turf jealousy, and mind-numbing incompetence, they couldn’t find their butts with a flashlight, both hands and a map.

It took the efforts of Mr. Spezi and his newspaper to finally solve the crime. The police, of course, ignore all the evidence Spezi has collected. The police, instead, almost literally find somebody walking down the street that sort of, kind of, in a way, maybe, supposedly, fits their profile. They arrest the guy, try and convict him. He’s thrown in jail until another murder is committed. The police do this two more times and in the end they have to let every one of their “suspects” go free.

The end is even scarier than Hannibal Lecter sashaying down the main street on the Island of Bimini at the end of The Silence of the Lambs. The real killer is interviewed by Preston and Spezi. They have all but proven in a court of law that the man in question did it. At the time of this book’s publication the police have, apparently, ended their investigation and the Monster is still living and walking
the streets of Florence.

Alrighty, then! I think I’ll just spend a few extra days in Venice!
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