Italian Crime Fiction

Morris Duckworth teaches English to the pampered rich of Verona, and Morris is not pleased. Living a meager existence in a squalid apartment, he regards his privileged students with envy and disdain, first wreaking revenge by petty theft and then, like all good criminals, graduating to grander larceny. When one of those students, a beautiful but vapid heiress named Massimina, falls in love with him, Morris can almost smell upward mobility.

THE FIRST SIX BOOKS OF THE QUEEN OF SPADES CRIME THRILLER SERIES. From award-winning journalist and USA TODAY Bestselling author Kristi Belcamino. What readers are saying: ★★★★★ “Another edge of your seat read by Kristi Belcamino.”
 ★★★★★“Queen of Spades is an action-driven book with a gripping storyline; I read it in one day as I simply could not put it down.” - MaryAnn Forbes
 ★★★★★WORTHY OF 10+ STARS” - Amazon ⚠️Warning! Be prepared to lose sleep and skip chores while reading this series! Book 1: Queen of Spades When Eva Santella’s father...

Auntie Poldi, sassy, brassy, and 60, moves to Sicily for a quiet alcohol-fuelled retirement. A murder spoils her plans. This is the first novel in a charming new mystery series set in Sicily and laced with Italian sensuality and humor. It features an amateur sleuth, the sassy and foul-mouthed Auntie Poldi. Recently widowed Poldi moves to Sicily in order to quietly drink herself to death with a sea view, but fate intervenes. When she finds the corpse of a young man on the beach, his face blown off with a sawn-off shotgun, she becomes a potential suspect in his murder case.

Former Italian Mafia boss, turned vigilante fugitive, Eva Santella - aka the Queen of Spades - owns a training school for assassins in the old country, but her main priority is traveling around the world to help those who cannot help themselves and turn to her as a last resort. Now, in this eighth book of the series, Eva Santella leaves Sicily to travel to the American south to search for three missing—and pregnant women. The state of Alabama has just outlawed abortion and Eva suspects there might be a connection. She doesn't know who is behind the disappearances, but is certain that if ...

People mistake her for an average teenage girl … That’s often their last mistake. After being the youngest and the most dangerous assassin at the secret Italian facility that teaches young women how to kill, Rose abandoned her training to live as a normal teenager. Years later, her dark past and worst enemies catch up with her and destroy everything she holds dear. Now she only has one thing on her mind—a deadly vendetta. She won’t rest until there is blood on her hands one more time. Even if some of the blood ends up being her own. Blood & Roses is the first book in the Vigilante ...

Cleveland Noir joins Columbus Noir as the Akashic Noir series continues its tour of Ohio and navigates the dregs of the North Shore.

A beautiful but deadly serial killer is on the loose, dishing out gruesome and lethal punishment to men who reject her … When Rose arrives in Florida to meet her new love, she is stood up at the airport, but chalks it up to a misunderstanding. She soon learns there is more to her boyfriend’s disappearance than him going on a wild drinking bender. After a frustrating and ultimately fruitless search, Rose realizes he is being held against his will. Rose must risk everything to unravel the woman’s deadly plot before she once again loses the man she loves to a killer. Blood & Bone is the ...

On the surface, Bria's Mediterranean life radiates beauty—the kind her late husband, Carlo, dreamed about when he concocted the romantic idea to start a bed and breakfast on the breathtaking Amalfi Coast. With the grand opening of Bella Bella approaching six months after Carlo's tragic death, Bria and her eight-year-old son Marco brace for a bittersweet new beginning by the sea . . . Before celebratory vino flows on opening day, a stranger appears in an otherwise pristine guest room, lifeless and covered in blood. Bria can't understand why murder would check into Bella Bella.

Rome whispers about a poison that looks like holy water. They call it Aqua Tofana—a saint-faced bottle passed hand to hand, a rumour with a price, a promise made to desperate wives behind shuttered windows. Men call it evil. Priests call it temptation. The streets call it justice. But Giulia knows what it really is: a brand built in the cracks of a city that leaves women no safe exits. When a quiet network of laundresses, servants and midwives begins to fray under pressure—boots on stone, coins offered for silence, and the Church leaning close—Giulia must protect the one person she ...

Rick Montoya has just moved from Santa Fe to Rome, embracing the life of a translator. He's beginning to settle in to la dolce vita when school friend Beppo, now senior in the Italian Art Squad, recruits Rick for an unofficial undercover role. Armed with a list of galleries, suspects, and an expense account, Rick arrives in Tuscany posing as a buyer for a Santa Fe gallery to flush out traffickers in priceless burial urns. However, before sunset on his first day in Volterra, the challenge intensifies. Rick has one quick conversation with a gallery employee who dies minutes later in a brutal fall from a high cliff.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A NEW YORKER RECOMMENDED BOOK IRISH BESTSELLER “A stylish escapade that even Henry James might relish." —Wall Street Journal A masterful, enthralling new novel from the Booker Prize winner Everything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and...

She’s the enemy’s daughter, but I’ll burn the world to make her mine. When you’re born into a powerful Mafia family, you learn that control is everything. And love? It’s just another weakness. But then she walked into my life: Carlotta D’Amici. Fierce and sassy, wrapped in the kind of curves that could bring a man to his knees. I saved her once, and now she’s mine. She just doesn’t know it yet. Our families have been at war for decades, so getting close to her is dangerous. But her eyes hold a secret that keeps me coming back for more. Tangled up in a world she can’t ...

An old family secret leads from the streets of Sydney to Italy’s sun-drenched Neapolitan coast, in this immersive historical mystery from #1 international bestselling author Tara Moss Pacific Ocean, 1907. A girl embarks on a journey to begin a new life far from home. Naples, 1943. A woman...

Mission: get close to a mafia heir, not get pregnant with his baby. I stepped into his world as a challenger in a street race. Dario Marchetti, known as an unstoppable predator on the asphalt, is dangerous, alluring and the heir of the Marchetti Empire. My mission’s clear: infiltrate the mafia and bring them down. But as the engines revive, one look into his dark eyes and I know I’m in trouble. I’m inches away from victory when he almost runs me over the edge. He rescues me before the car slips into the abyss, and I’m gone with the wind. Then a mysterious invitation to a masquerade ...

THE MISSING YEARS FROM THE GREATEST CRIME SAGA OF ALL TIME Thirty-five years ago, Mario Puzo’s great American tale, The Godfather, was published, and popular culture was indelibly changed. Now, in The Godfather Returns, acclaimed novelist Mark Winegardner continues the story–the years not...

Per quanto Fallon cerchi di controllarlo, il suo potere cresce costantemente, dominandola. In un impeto di disperazione chiede aiuto alla persona più improbabile, e viene perfidamente tradita nel peggiore dei modi. Ma nella sua vita rimane quel faro luminoso, la persona che riesce sempre ad aiutarla e a tirarla fuori dai guai quando tutti gli altri falliscono: Ariyon Madden, che ora deve decidere fino a che punto è disposto a spingersi per salvare la ragazza che ama e coloro che si è impegnato a proteggere.

In a city of masks, no one is what they seem . . . Englishman Richard Hughes has survived a stint as a galley slave and is now a free man in Venice, where he enjoys a modest life as a fencing master. He believes he has long-since left behind the ideals that landed him in slavery...until he...

When the trauma surgeon saves his first love's life, he discovers some wounds never heal—and some loves never die. Dr. Ethan Cross has spent ten years trying to forget Marco Santini. Ten years since the man he loved vanished without explanation, leaving nothing but a cryptic text message and a shattered heart. Ethan threw himself into medicine, building a career saving lives in New York's busiest ER. Then Marco is wheeled into his trauma bay—unconscious, bleeding out from a gunshot wound, and even more dangerous than Ethan remembered. A standalone MM mafia romance featuring second-...

When private investigator, Dan Armstrong, and his girlfriend, Anna, are invited to the gorgeous island of Elba for a much-needed break, he jumps at the chance. The thought of sun-drenched shores makes Dan promise Anna he won't “play detective” for a whole week… Their luxurious hotel, with its wonderful food and picturesque seaside views, seems the perfect escape, especially with Dan's best friend Virgilio and his wife joining them. But the calm shatters with a sinister encounter and a sudden, suspicious death..

“Commissario Guido Brunetti’s fourteenth case may be his best yet.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) On a cold Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a street vendor is killed in a scuffle in Campo San Stefano. The closest witnesses to the event are the tourists who had been browsing...