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| The Monster of Florence | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas Preston
Creator: Mario Spezi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $25.99
Buy New: $12.89
You Save: $13.10 (50%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (76 reviews)
Sales Rank: 520
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0446581194
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1523
EAN: 9780446581196
ASIN: 0446581194
Publication Date: June 10, 2008
Release Date: June 10, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In the nonfiction tradition of John Berendt ("Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil") and Erik Larson ("The Devil in the White City"), New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston presents a gripping account of crime and punishment in the lush hills surrounding Florence, Italy.
In 2000, Douglas Preston fulfilled a dream to move his family to Italy. Then he discovered that the olive grove in front of their 14th century farmhouse had been the scene of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history, committed by a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. Preston, intrigued, meets Italian investigative journalist Mario Spezi to learn more. This is the true story of their search for--and identification of--the man they believe committed the crimes, and their chilling interview with him. And then, in a strange twist of fate, Preston and Spezi themselves become targets of the police investigation. Preston has his phone tapped, is interrogated, and told to leave the country. Spezi fares worse: he is thrown into Italy's grim Capanne prison, accused of being the Monster of Florence himself. Like one of Preston's thrillers, The Monster Of Florence, tells a remarkable and harrowing story involving murder, mutilation, and suicide-and at the center of it, Preston and Spezi, caught in a bizarre prosecutorial vendetta.
Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, June 2008: When author Douglas Preston moved his family to Florence he never expected he would soon become obsessed and entwined in a horrific crime story whose true-life details rivaled the plots of his own bestselling thrillers. While researching his next book, Preston met Mario Spezi, an Italian journalist who told him about the Monster of Florence, Italy's answer to Jack the Ripper, a terror who stalked lovers' lanes in the Italian countryside. The killer would strike at the most intimate time, leaving mutilated corpses in his bloody wake over a period from 1968 to 1985. One of these crimes had taken place in an olive grove on the property of Preston's new home. That was enough for him to join "Monsterologist" Spezi on a quest to name the killer, or killers, and bring closure to these unsolved crimes. Local theories and accusations flourished: the killer was a cuckolded husband; a local aristocrat; a physician or butcher, someone well-versed with knives; a satanic cult. Thomas Harris even dipped into "Monster" lore for some of Hannibal Lecter's more Grand Guignol moments in Hannibal. Add to this a paranoid police force more concerned with saving face and naming a suspect (any suspect) than with assessing the often conflicting evidence on hand, and an unbelievable twist that finds both authors charged with obstructing justice, with Spezi jailed on suspicion of being the Monster himself. The Monster of Florence is split into two sections: the first half is Spezi's story, with the latter bringing in Preston's updated involvement on the case. Together these two parts create a dark and fascinating descent into a landscape of horror that deserves to be shelved between In Cold Blood and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. --Brad Thomas Parsons
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| Customer Reviews: Read 71 more reviews...
 Surprisingly Boring August 25, 2008
Sensational, horrible, serial murders in Florence. The lead investigative journalist comes under suspicion. Stunning, riveting story. Yes? Not as told in this particular book. I found this book tedious to get through. The second half was really a slog. I can't say exactly why. Perhaps it was the writing. Perhaps this particular team written effort just did not work for me. Perhaps both of the authors had written too much already about these murders and this version just came through stale.
Portrait of Evil August 23, 2008
Very well written. The Monster is the Italian equivalent of Jack the Ripper and just reading some of the accounts makes one shudder. Lots of discussion of conspiracy theories. Still, at the end, like Jack, we don't learn the monster's identity.
 Okay book, but drags on August 21, 2008
This is a very interesting story, although I don't know worthy of an entire book. The beginning of the book is vey interesting, but the 2nd half of the book drags on making it hard to finished.
Unhappy listener review August 21, 2008
The story is fascinating and as far as I can tell accurately told. I grew up Florence and am very familiar with the whole story. On the other hand I found it almost impossible to listen to the audio version because practically EVERY word in Italian was mispronounced. Given that most of the words in Italian were constantly repeated, often of well known sites and people and ultimately not that difficult to enunciate, I really do not understand why the producers did not try to avoid this problem. In addition, Neapolitan music was used for a story that takes place in Tuscany and most upsetting of all, the voices of Italian speakers were rendered with heavy, almost insultingly stereotypical accents. A WORD TO HACHETTE: please do not do this again! Thank you.
 The Insanity that can be Italy August 20, 2008
OK. So the fact that the Italian city states weren't unified into the country we know as Italy until 1861 speaks to a lack of historic organizational structure. And there have been more than sixty government changes at the Prime Minister level since World War II. These elements and more could come into play when examining the chaos that is Italy's judiciary. In Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi's non-fiction account of the "Monster" serial killings around Florence in the 1970s and 1980s, we see that something is horribly, stinking rotten in the core of Italian criminal investigation and prosecution that would take an entire armada of sociologists to understand. To say that fantasy and paranoia drive the actions of even the most senior investigators and judges is to give fantasy and paranoia far too good a name. In a nutshell, why bother going to the heart of the investigation by carefully following evidence that leads to a lone suspect who is a textbook model of a serial killer when you could start a witch hunt that would encompass dozens of people (including a whole village) in a charge of murder as a byproduct of Satanic worship? Without a shred of evidence of course. Why bother taking the most obvious road when you could settle grievances going back decades with spurious charges? Why end the investigation quickly when you could drag it out, garner more publicity, and advance your career?
It is interesting to note that Preston became involved only because he was in Italy doing research for one of his fiction thrillers and just happened to rent a farmhouse next to where one of the murders took place. He started asking questions and was connected with Spezi, a seasoned Italian investigative journalist whose beat was these murders of young couples trysting in the hills around Florence. Spezi's part of the story is told first and he and Preston do a nice job of laying out the basic facts, including the puzzling-then-horrifying actions of the police and judiciary. Spezi's work requires fairly detailed explanations of institutions that don't have true parallels in American society and these were efficiently done. Both he and Preston, who is much better recognized for his fiction, know their craft and all of their skills are on display in this book. I was especially impressed with how much care is taken to ensure that we know the murdered couples and their stories.
Once the story is laid out and we know the extremely large cast of characters (it really helps to have most of their pictures in a section in the middle of the book), the real story of Spezi and Preston can be told and, to other liberty and sanity loving Westerners, it emerges as a nightmare worthy of Orwell. After writing vigorously about the disarray in the investigation, Spezi is arrested as a suspected accomplice to the murders and all of his notes and research are taken, including his work on this book. Luckily for him, he was able to hide a disk that contained much of what we read here. Preston's status as a world-famous writer did not protect him here, either. Since he didn't arrive in Italy until 2000, they couldn't charge him with being directly involved in the murders but they were able to charge him as an accomplice after the fact and ban him from returning to Italy.
This is an absorbing read from beginning to end and a story that really needs to be told. And it is a cautionary tale about running afoul of Italian authorities. The truth may not set you free.
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