Lascia stare i morti

In 1980’s Faenza,  a former police officer must contend with ghosts from the past when a cold case involving missing children resurfaces, revealing a chain of power, Fascist  nostalgia and dark rituals. A crime novel that probes the shadows of Italy’s provinces.

September 1980. Ciparisso Briganti, a.k.a. Briga, is a police officer and former partisan whose life now seems to go on peacefully amid cases of marriage infidelity, evenings spent at the bowling alley and rehearsing with his jazz band. But everything changes when an anonymous note arrives and reopens a painful wound from the past: the brutal murder of four children, five years earlier, including Giovanni, the son of Briga’s partner Sabrina. A case that not only cost him his career, but left him with too many unanswered questions.
Briga accepts the challenge to go back to the investigation and steps into a dark spiral that leads him to the discovery of a network of unimaginable secrets: a sect of nostalgic Fascists, mysteries concealed in an abandoned villa and a chain of violent events involving individuals above suspicion, such as former magistrates and police chief inspectors.
When new evidence suggests that Chiara, the fifth missing child, could still be alive, the investigation takes on a personal and dramatic turn. Briga has to decide how far he can go to obtain justice and confront a past that still torments him.