Adam's Rib: A Rocco Schiavone Mystery by Antonio Manzini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"A man has every season while a woman only has the right to spring."
(Jane Fonda's quote used by Antonio Manzini as the epigraph to his novel.)

Adam's Rib (2014, Italian original) is the second novel in Antonio Manzini's series featuring Rocco Schiavone. Like the previous book, Black Run , I have read it in (very good) Polish translation (Żebro Adama). The plot happens in Aosta in northern Italy, where Rocco Schiavone, a Deputy-Chief of police, has been banished as a result of his unprofessional behavior on the Rome police force. In fact, in this novel we learn the nature of Rocco's misdeed: if one were sympathetic to this type of behavior - I am definitely not - one would euphemistically characterize it as 'violating the law to administer justice.' The reader also learns about painful events from Rocco's personal past.

The plot begins when Irina, a Belarussian emigrant working as a cleaning woman, finds the apartment of her employers burglarized. She alarms the police and Rocco with his cliché sidekick, Italo, find a woman hanged from a chandelier in the bedroom. Various clues point to suicide but Rocco - a phenomenally shrewd detective - obviously knows better and suspects the suicide has been staged. The denouement is really clever and readers who like plot twists will not regret carefully following the story to the very end.

Rocco is as women-crazy as in the previous installment:

"An obviously attractive woman's body was concealed under the drab policewoman uniform. Pity that the overcoat hid her butt, but Rocco had been able to rate it earlier, when she was wearing uniform pants."

Beating suspects during interrogation will probably not endear Rocco to the readers, unless they subscribe to the belief that "suspects are always guilty of whatever they are accused of," in immortal words of Monty Python.

Like in the first book in the series the thread about Rocco's wife, Marina, is to me the best thing in the novel. The prose in this storyline reads authentic and fresh, not as clichéd as in the procedural thread or in descriptions of Rocco's interactions with other people. The affecting exchange between Rocco and a pathologist performing an autopsy caught my attention:

"'I assure you these are wonderful patients - quite calm and uncomplaining.'
'Alberto, they are dead. How could they complain?'
'Maybe not. But if you listen very carefully, sometimes you will hear their quiet pleas to cut their bodies delicately.'"
(This reviewer's translation of Polish translation of the Italian original.)

The author is much more subtle than Rocco, his thug protagonist. It is hard not to like the epigraph quote, either.

Two and three quarter stars.


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