In the summer of 1981, the
historic city of Florence, Italy was rocked by the brutal murder of two lovers
in a parked car. Mario Spezi was a newspaperman who caught the case and became
the city's foremost expert on what turned out to a serial killer with at least
14—and maybe 16—victims. The murderer, dubbed The Monster by the
press, shot and mutilated couples having sex in the Florentine hills (a
time-honored custom in a country where late marriage is common, and living
together is unthinkable). His signatures were a distinctive notch on the shell
casings and the removal of the women's sex organs. Although the case was an
Italian obsession for years and inspired Thomas Harris' sequel Hannibal, The Monster remained
relatively unknown in America.
So when popular author Douglas Preston arrived in Florence to write
a novel and contacted Spezi for research purposes, he stumbled onto a real-life
mystery more compelling than the fiction he had planned. In the first part of The Monster Of Florence, he retraces Spezi's involvement with the '80s
investigations, weaving an increasingly maddening tale of promising leads left
hanging and ambitious prosecutors framing the innocent. In the second, Preston
reveals how his own attempts to revive the case in the early 2000s led to Spezi
becoming a suspect and Preston being indicted for his association with the
journalist.
The Monster Of Florence is the most exasperating
true-crime book in years, because the Italian authorities seem determined to
spin the wildest fantasies rather than following actual clues. The so-called
"Sardinian Trail," a line of inquiry focusing on an insular group of families
from Sardinia who originally imported the murder weapon, was abandoned when the
judge could not close the case. Instead, mental defectives, prostitutes, and
other motley characters were used to implicate a group of "picnicking friends"
whom the prosecution painted as the leaders in an orgiastic Satanic cult. When
Preston is questioned about whether he and Spezi planted evidence to prove
their version of the crime, the book's through-the-looking-glass tension is
almost unbearable. Although The Monster Of Florence doesn't solve the case,
presenting only a likely story, its headlong rush into the horror of official
incompetence is more than compensation for the real-life loose ends.