The New York Times: Reading a novel by Maurizio de Giovanni is like stepping into a Vittorio De Sica movie."

Reading a novel by Maurizio de Giovanni is like stepping into a Vittorio De Sica movie. The sights and smells of Naples are pungently evoked in EVERYONE IN THEIR PLACE (Europa, paper, $17), the latest entry in a superb historical series set in Fascist Italy during the 1930s and featuring one of the most melancholy detectives in European noir crime fiction. Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi is burdened by a terrible gift: He can see the revenants of murder victims and hear their last thoughts. The haunted commissario conducts an investigation into the murder of a duchess who was quite the woman of affairs. The boudoir may hold the answer to the crime, but we’re more captivated by the streets outside the palaz­zo, where families gather on a sweltering Sunday night to pump some lifeblood into this “crazy, laughing city.”