With the publication of Pentimento Mori, Kazabo Publishing has introduced the English-speaking reader to one of the major Italian crime fiction writers, a woman, Valeria Corciolani.
She has become popular thanks to her first six-volumes series (running from 2017 through 2021) dedicated to the character of Alma Boero, a cleaning lady endowed with a unvoluntary sixth sense for smelling the scent of crime wherever she is hired (by the first episode, she will become the unofficial, and yet indispensable, assistant of chief inspector, Jules Rosset).
The second series (running from 2021 through 2025), of which Pentimento Mori (in the original Con l’arte e con l’inganno, 2021) is the first installment, has at its center Edna Silvera, an art critic with a stratospheric knowledge, which allows her to connect the most diverse information and details she comes across into an endless network of clues, eventually leading to the unravelling of the mysteries unfailingly prior to the police.
In 2024, she also started a new series, dedicated to chief inspector Piera Jantet, so far with just the first episode. In the meantime, she published few other volumes between 2010 and 2017 where her crime-fiction inspiration is played on a more playful tone (one of them, Il morso del ramarro [The Bite of the Lizard], 2014, has been adapted into a length feature movie in 2022, and reprinted, along two others, in a three-volumes series dedicated to “Animals, Crimes and Misdemeanors,” 2022-24).
Finally, in 2023 and 2025, she published two other novels with two other, different, female main characters. I need also to point out that she had started her creative career as illustrator and writer of teen literature.
Corciolani’s abundant literary production must not scare the reader, since several aspects (of content and style) are obsessively recurring in all her work. For instance, the setting is invariably the Liguria region, and in particular its Eastern side, around the town of Chiavari, where the writer resides (although the Jantet-series novel takes place in the North-Western corner of Italy, in the region of Val d’Aosta). As I already remarked, the main character will invariably be a woman, usually endowed with a strong, but not callous, personality.
Additionally, these women will find themselves involuntarily involved in crime investigations without even knowing why or how. Men are always playing a secondary role, and Corciolani likes to expose their weaknesses (usually caused by an excess of narcissism), although a character like the inspector Rosset (also from Val d’Aosta) becomes endearing because of the awkwardness that he fails to conceal despite his efforts.
If the Boero’s series had at its center Alma’s family, composed by her two pairs of young twins plus her elderly mother-in-law (her ex-husband has preferred to move to Australia and get remarried there), Edna is instead an untamed single, approaching middle-age and with an axe to grind with Italian institutions, whether universities (which she has left in disgust for the dominating cronyism and macho-driven culture) or the police. In this regard, very enjoyable are her exchanges with the public prosecutor Jacopo Bassi, who, despite the dislike he immediately provokes in Edna, reveals himself to be cleverer than his polished and clean look had made her think of him. Her solely company seems then to be her pets: the hens and cat she talks to when she needs to vent her frustration (which happens quite often).
In sum, what makes her novels a very pleasant reading are the invariable general wittiness and verbal playfulness, that the translation of Pentimento Mori has exceptionally succeeded to render. Certainly, a “you can’t put down when you begin” book! Even if his/her knowledge will be limited to just one novel, in Pentimento Mori the English-speaking reader will nevertheless find a very fitting entry door into the world of this fascinating and unique author within the current Italian literary landscape.
