Blood Curse

The Springtime of Commissario Ricciardi

By: Maurizio de Giovanni

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Ricciardi has visions. He sees and hears the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths. It is both a gift and a curse. It has helped him become one of the most acute and successful homicide detectives in the Naples police force. But all that horror and suffering has hollowed him out emotionally: He drinks and doesn't sleep. Other than his loyal partner, Brigadier Maione, he has no friends.

Naples,1931. In a working-class apartment in the Sanita neighborhood, an elderly woman by the name of Carmela Calise has been beaten to death. When Ricciardi and Maione arrive at the scene, they start asking the neighbors questions. No one wants to talk, but slowly a few interesting facts slip out. Carmela Calise was moonlighting as a fortune-teller and moneylender. In her decrepit apartment, she would receive clients - among them some of the city's rich and powerful - predicting their futures in such a way as to manipulate and deceive. If economic ruin lurked in their futures, Calise was happy to help - for a price,of course. She had many enemies: those indebted to her, manipulated by her lies, disappointed by her prophesies, or destroyed by her machinations. Murder suspects in this atmospheric thriller abound, and Commissario Ricciardi, one of the most original and intriguing investigators in contemporary crime fiction, will have his work cut out for him.

©2013 Maurizio de Giovanni (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

A magical human novel

A perfect story, beautifully crafted and with an excellent performance. I couldn’t stop this book.

I didn’t order this book. Didn’t read it. Can’t get it off my computer. So annoying.

I didn’t order the book. Didn’t want the book. Didn’t read the book. Can’t delete the book.

Confusing

if this was the first book of the series that I read I wouldn't have read another one. Thank goodness the rest are so much better.

The rot sets in.

So sad to find that the brilliant start of Vengeace has already deteriorated into pretty lame and boring romantic subplots that dominate the storyline. I’m listening out of sequence and last heard viper which is much later in the series and which I could only finish with many skips of needless and tedious chapters recycling the same ‘she was thinking of…later she thought of…he wondered what she was doing’ type padding. Sadly this second in the series is already suffocating under these lackluster intrusions into an interesting and original take on the genre. I now quit this series. Grover Gardner made it painless but eventually the decline in quality was too much.

Not his best work

I've thoroughly enjoyed many of Maurizio de Giovanni's books but this story is lacking in so many ways including a tedious plot and predictable characters.