Review: The Monster of Florence

“Many countries have a serial killer who defines his culture by a process of negation, who exemplifies his era not by exalting its values, but by exposing its black underbelly. England had Jack the Ripper, born in the fogs of Dickensian London, who preyed on the city’s most neglected underclass, the prostitutes who scrabbled for a living in the slums of Whitechapel. Boston had the Boston Strangler, the suave, handsome killer who prowled the city’s more elegant neighbourhoods, raping and murdering elderly women and arranging their bodies in tableaux of unspeakable obscenity. Germany had the Monster of Dusseldorf, who seemed to foreshadow the coming of Hitler by his indiscriminate and sadistic killing of men, women and children; his bloodlust was so great that, on the eve of his execution, he called his imminent beheading ‘the pleasure to end all pleasures.’ Each killer was, in his own way, a dark embodiment of his time and place.

Italy had the Monster of Florence.”

 The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

*

In 2000, American writer Douglas Preston moved to Florence with his wife and two young children, planning on spending his time in the city that gave the world the Renaissance, writing a crime novel. In a meeting with famous Italian journalist Mario Spezzi, originally set up as part of Preston’s research into the workings of the Italian police procedure, he learnt that the villa he was living in with his family was a stone’s throw away from the scene of a grisly double homicide, committed by, as Spezi put it, ‘Italy’s own Jack the Ripper.’

The Monster of Florence terrorised the beautiful rolling hills of Tuscany for ten years, killing young lovers in their cars and, on several occasions, removing body parts of the female victims. The wild goose chase that ensued, as the police attempted to catch the monster and end the mania sweeping the public, saw arrests made left, right and centre, and conspiracy theories move to the forefront of the investigations. Within the investigations, few agreed on anything, and politics exerted an unfortunate influence over the directions taken and discoveries made. To this day, The Monster of Florence remains uncaught, and he hasn’t killed since 1985.

Preston and Spezi’s joint effort in penning a book on the darkly seductive and still unsolved case of The Monster of Florence was seen as a direct challenge to the investigation and landed Spezi in jail, his treatment akin to that of criminals who pose the greatest threat to the security of the country. Preston himself was questioned and named as a persona indagata (person of interest) which he remains to this day. Together, the two writers trawled through decades of Spezi’s research, eventually spinning an account of this fascinating, dreadful and utterly gothic case that is compulsively readable.

I loved this book. Loved. The writing style is the lovechild of a happy marriage between journalism and creativity, the necessary history lessons so crisply written you don’t want them to end, and the undercurrent of suspense and unease so masterfully woven into a study of Italian culture and politics, you will reach the end before you know it. And wish fervently there was more.

Do yourselves a favour and buy it here.