Product Description

In the nonfiction tradition of John Berendt ("Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil") and Erik Larson ("The Devil in the White City"), New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston presents a gripping account of crime and punishment in the lush hills surrounding Florence, Italy.
In 2000, Douglas Preston fulfilled a dream to move his family to Italy. Then he discovered that the olive grove in front of their 14^th century farmhouse had been the scene of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history, committed by a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. Preston, intrigued, meets Italian investigative journalist Mario Spezi to learn more. This is the true story of their search for--and identification of--the man they believe committed the crimes, and their chilling interview with him. And then, in a strange twist of fate, Preston and Spezi themselves become targets of the police investigation. Preston has his phone tapped, is interrogated, and told to leave the country. Spezi fares worse: he is thrown into Italy's grim Capanne prison, accused of being the Monster of Florence himself. Like one of Preston's thrillers, The Monster Of Florence, tells a remarkable and harrowing story involving murder, mutilation, and suicide-and at the center of it, Preston and Spezi, caught in a bizarre prosecutorial vendetta.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #326 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-10
• Released on: 2008-06-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, June 2008: When author Douglas Preston moved his family to Florence he never expected he would soon become obsessed and entwined in a horrific crime story whose true-life details rivaled the plots of his own bestselling thrillers. While researching his next book, Preston met Mario Spezi, an Italian journalist who told him about the Monster of Florence, Italy's answer to Jack the Ripper, a terror who stalked lovers' lanes in the Italian countryside. The killer would strike at the most intimate time, leaving mutilated corpses in his bloody wake over a period from 1968 to 1985. One of these crimes had taken place in an olive grove on the property of Preston's new home. That was enough for him to join "Monsterologist" Spezi on a quest to name the killer, or killers, and bring closure to these unsolved crimes. Local theories and accusations flourished: the killer was a cuckolded husband; a local aristocrat; a physician or butcher, someone well-versed with knives; a satanic cult. Thomas Harris even dipped into "Monster" lore for some of Hannibal Lecter's more Grand Guignol moments in Hannibal. Add to this a paranoid police force more concerned with saving face and naming a suspect (any suspect) than with assessing the often conflicting evidence on hand, and an unbelievable twist that finds both authors charged with obstructing justice, with Spezi jailed on suspicion of being the Monster himself. The Monster of Florence is split into two sections: the first half is Spezi's story, with the latter bringing in Preston's updated involvement on the case. Together these two parts create a dark and fascinating descent into a landscape of horror that deserves to be shelved between In Cold Blood and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. --Brad Thomas Parsons

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. United in their obsession with a grisly Italian serial murder case almost three decades old, thriller writer Preston (coauthor, Brimstone) and Italian crime reporter Spezi seek to uncover the identity of the killer in this chilling true crime saga. From 1974 to 1985, seven pairs of lovers parked in their cars in secluded areas outside of Florence were gruesomely murdered. When Preston and his family moved into a farmhouse near the murder sites, he and Spezi began to snoop around, although witnesses had died and evidence was missing. With all of the chief suspects acquitted or released from prison on appeal, Preston and Spezi's sleuthing continued until ruthless prosecutors turned on the nosy pair, jailing Spezi and grilling Preston for obstructing justice. Only when Dateline NBC became involved in the maze of mutilated bodies and police miscues was the authors' hard work rewarded. This suspenseful procedural reveals much about the dogged writing team as well as the motives of the killers. Better than some overheated noir mysteries, this bit of real-life Florence bloodletting makes you sweat and think, and presses relentlessly on the nerves. (June 11)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Douglas Preston worked for the American Museum of Natural History as managing editor of Curator magazine. He's also written articles for The New Yorker, Natural History, Travel & Leisure, Reader's Digest, National Geographic, Harper's, Smithsonian, and Atlantic.

Mario Spezi is an Italian journalist who has been investigating the Monster of Florence case since the first murders in 1974.

Customer Reviews

Okay book, but drags on
This is a very interesting story, although I don't know worthy of an entire book. The beginning of the book is vey interesting, but the 2nd half of the book drags on making it hard to finished.

Unhappy listener review
The story is fascinating and as far as I can tell accurately told. I grew up Florence and am very familiar with the whole story. On the other hand I found it almost impossible to listen to the audio version because practically EVERY word in Italian was mispronounced. Given that most of the words in Italian were constantly repeated, often of well known sites and people and ultimately not that difficult to enunciate, I really do not understand why the producers did not try to avoid this problem. In addition, Neapolitan music was used for a story that takes place in Tuscany and most upsetting of all, the voices of Italian speakers were rendered with heavy, almost insultingly stereotypical accents. A WORD TO HACHETTE: please do not do this again! Thank you.

The Insanity that can be Italy
OK. So the fact that the Italian city states weren't unified into the country we know as Italy until 1861 speaks to a lack of historic organizational structure. And there have been more than sixty government changes at the Prime Minister level since World War II. These elements and more could come into play when examining the chaos that is Italy's judiciary. In Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi's non-fiction account of the "Monster" serial killings around Florence in the 1970s and 1980s, we see that something is horribly, stinking rotten in the core of Italian criminal investigation and prosecution that would take an entire armada of sociologists to understand. To say that fantasy and paranoia drive the actions of even the most senior investigators and judges is to give fantasy and paranoia far too good a name. In a nutshell, why bother going to the heart of the investigation by carefully following evidence that leads to a lone suspect who is a textbook model of a serial killer when you could start a witch hunt that would encompass dozens of people (including a whole village) in a charge of murder as a byproduct of Satanic worship? Without a shred of evidence of course. Why bother taking the most obvious road when you could settle grievances going back decades with spurious charges? Why end the investigation quickly when you could drag it out, garner more publicity, and advance your career?

It is interesting to note that Preston became involved only because he was in Italy doing research for one of his fiction thrillers and just happened to rent a farmhouse next to where one of the murders took place. He started asking questions and was connected with Spezi, a seasoned Italian investigative journalist whose beat was these murders of young couples trysting in the hills around Florence. Spezi's part of the story is told first and he and Preston do a nice job of laying out the basic facts, including the puzzling-then-horrifying actions of the police and judiciary. Spezi's work requires fairly detailed explanations of institutions that don't have true parallels in American society and these were efficiently done. Both he and Preston, who is much better recognized for his fiction, know their craft and all of their skills are on display in this book. I was especially impressed with how much care is taken to ensure that we know the murdered couples and their stories.

Once the story is laid out and we know the extremely large cast of characters (it really helps to have most of their pictures in a section in the middle of the book), the real story of Spezi and Preston can be told and, to other liberty and sanity loving Westerners, it emerges as a nightmare worthy of Orwell. After writing vigorously about the disarray in the investigation, Spezi is arrested as a suspected accomplice to the murders and all of his notes and research are taken, including his work on this book. Luckily for him, he was able to hide a disk that contained much of what we read here. Preston's status as a world-famous writer did not protect him here, either. Since he didn't arrive in Italy until 2000, they couldn't charge him with being directly involved in the murders but they were able to charge him as an accomplice after the fact and ban him from returning to Italy.

This is an absorbing read from beginning to end and a story that really needs to be told. And it is a cautionary tale about running afoul of Italian authorities. The truth may not set you free.