The bare mountain of Aspromonte rises at its tip above Reggio, overlooking the Strait of Messina with Etna in the distance. It’s quite unlike anywhere else in Italy. I spent a fair bit of time down there thinking about this book, and gradually being won over by the place. At most it might be somewhere they drive through on the way to their holidays in Sicily. But Calabria…? Even lots of Italians don’t know the area well.
The sights - the Pantheon, the Vatican - and the history are a part of a world we recognise. Rome is a city we all know in some ways, even if we’ve never been there. Costa and the rest struggle with that dilemma constantly, and as we find out later they’re not the only ones.Īnother challenge is the location itself. Clue: there’s one of the book’s themes… how very hard it is to pretend you’re someone else. Here they are undercover, wearing new identities and very much at the beck and call of the mobster who’s demanding Costa join his crime family temporarily in order to facilitate his escape. Usually they’re cops, in control of territory they feel they own. They’ve been dispatched to the toe of Italy, Calabria, a place they don’t know, and tasked with a tricky dilemma: the shadowy boss of one of the crime families there wants to turn state witness. Costa and his colleagues are no longer in the safe confines of Rome, with the power of police officers to protect them as they go about their work. In The Savage Shore it’s a pretty stiff one.
Every book, whether it’s in a series or not, has to have some new approach and challenge. But I never want to retread old formulas. It felt good to be working with the old crew again.
The paperback will appear next May, but I’m delighted to tell you the audio version will be out alongside the hardback on Tuesday, narrated as usual by the incomparable Saul Reichlin and published by Whole Story Audio. You can find the US edition along with the ebook on November 1, and in September the Dutch translation from Boekerij, De binnenste cirkel. Nic Costa and team - Teresa Lupo, Leo Falcone and Gianni Peroni - are back on Tuesday (July 31) for the first time in quite a while in a new adventure, The Savage Shore, published by Severn House.
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