Review: Flowers Over the Inferno

Hello wonderful people? How are you? March has finally begun and the Spring is almost there… I love Winter, I really do, but I love Spring too and I am ready for her to come!
Ok, enough wheater talks, let’s go back to the point… books! When I was reading this book I wasn’t planning on speaking about it here, because it’s an Italian book, and there are so many books I want to share with you, that share something that isn’t written in English seemed to me like a little waste of my time… it’s not that speaking about books is a waste of time, never that! But I have so many books to share with you, that I was trying to keep the focus on books that we all can read… but then when I was writing my wrap-up for February I discovered that they translated in English too (it would come out in April!!!!), so now I have to speak about it, because this really deserves it!

Title: Flowers Over the Inferno
Author: Ilaria Tutti
Expected Publication Date: April 16th, 2019
Page count: 360
In a quiet village surrounded by ancient woods and the imposing Italian Alps, a man is found naked with his eyes gouged out. It is the first in a string of gruesome murders.
Superintendent Teresa Battaglia, a detective with a background in criminal profiling, is called to investigate. Battaglia is in her mid-sixties, her rank and expertise hard-won from decades of battling for respect in the male-dominated Italian police force. While she’s not sure she trusts the young city inspector assigned to assist her, she sees right away that this is no ordinary case: buried deep in these mountains are whispers of a dark and dangerous history, possibly tied to a group of eight-year-old children toward whom the killer seems to gravitate.
As Teresa inches closer to the truth, she must also confront the possibility that her body and mind, worn down by age and illness, may fail her before the chase is over.

I wished this book since it came out but I procrastinated a lot. And I really don’t know why! This is an amazing thriller! We have all: an intriguing idea, a compelling story-line, a good writing style, an original main character with some good secondary characters around a lot of intriguing insights. You can’t ask for more, but you know what? You get more! Because the location is so magistrally done and so interviewed with the story that became a character in its own right!

I won’t say anything on the story per se, because I am not going to spoil the fun to discover and learn what is happening for you, but I can say that it’s compelling, dark and intriguing, and that, as all the best stories, has its own roots in the past.
I devoured the book, and I was constantly in need to know, to understand, because I was hooked up, and I was from the beginning.

But, even if I can’t tell you a lot about the story I can speak about other things. Because it’s not just the story that makes a book good! So, let’s start with Teresa, the MC. She’s a woman and not a girl or a young woman, but really a woman who is starting to age, and that is torn between her work, demanding in more than one sense, and her health, she’s feeling like her body is betraying here, and I think it’s great that we can see that represented in books, too. We don’t see a lot of it, but I think that is greatly needed.
Also, she made me thinks a lot about Vera, the MC of a tv series (If you click on the name you would visit the Wikipedia page on that series).
And that’s not all. It’s true that I liked her because I liked the way she is, and what she represents and because I think I need more characters like her, yes, but I liked her because she is a great character, too. Well developed, real, so much so, that it seems like she is an old friend of yours. And that’s an amazing thing. When we find someone that we feel real, that we can consider a friend well, I think that this is one of the greatest gifts an author can make to her/his readers.
She’s a grumpy lady, accent on the grumpy, please, with a strong head and an even stronger will. And she’s full of knowledge, know-how, and expertise. She’s not lovable, in the traditional sense, but now here I am, eager to read more about her.
And we have a team of other cops, that are her cops, that are loyal to her and I think all of this was kind of sweet. Even if she’s not sweet, at all, and the poor Marini, the new member of the team, can be a testimonial to it. She is always grumpy, but with him, she gets grumpier and a little bit mean. She constantly tests him out, but it’s sort of motherly, even if not the sweetest ones!

And, as I was saying before, we have a dark and wild nature, that can be considered a character in its own right. It’s always there, and it has a great weight on the story and on the characters that are living and moving there.

But what I have loved more is that this book is full of… food for thoughts. We have a lot to munch on, and it’s one of that books in which you know what is good and what is bad, yes, but you also see that in real life you can’t always use the black and white scale and that we have a lot of grays in there, too.

And so I am here, waiting for the second book to come out because I am really curious and I am missing Teresa, too!