Valerio Varesi investigates in the Alps and tells his story in Toulouse
Valerio Varesi will be on Tuesday, May 10 at the La Renaissance bookstore to present “La main de Dieu”. A very successful addictive thriller.
Loyal to the Toulouse Polars du Sud festival, Valerio Varesi is also loyal to his French publisher, Agullo, with whom he has published his 7th novel, “La main de Dieu” (344 pages, €21.50). The starting point of the story is very classic, with the discovery of a body under a bridge in Parma. The sequel, which leads Commissioner Soneri to a remote village in the Apennines, in the Alps, is less so. The policeman then meets a young couple in trouble, a discarded communist priest, rough hunters, neo-rurals living on barter. The victim was the local strongman, whose fine parts attracted the notables…
As efficient as he is incorruptible, Commissioner Soneri is characterized by his absolute independence (“he hated when schedules regimented his wandering nature”), his solid appetite (do you like chard tortelli, gnocchi and anolini?), his fascination with the high mountains (“limpid scenery, intense beauty, magnificently unforgiving”). We follow this attached policeman, all senses alert, over a plot that keeps us tight.
In Aosta with Antonio Manzini
Strange coincidence, “Shadows and dust”, by Antonio Manzini, just published by Denoël (414 pages, €23.90), also begins with a corpse, that of a transgender woman, floating in Aosta… under a bridge. Beyond the investigation, the atmosphere and tone are quite different. Leader of a team of broken arms, Rocco Schiavone is a disillusioned policeman, sidelined in a city for which he has no affinity. He who “drags his life on his back like a heavy bundle of wood” has only “two suitcases and a dog”. Melancholy that does not prevent him from solving twisted puzzles. And Manzini to offer us a thriller that we devour quickly, like Commissioner Schiavone his pasta with clams – a guilty pleasure when his contemporaries carry around so many vices…