First the improbables and implausibles (and I give nothing away here: the publishers bullet-point the whole of Neil Griffiths’s plot on the jacket): a man, Jim Wolf, visits Naples for a two-day break on a whim. Upon arrival he is mysteriously ill and so allows himself to be delivered to a strange pensione, there to be cared for by a strangely detached landlady in a bare, uncomfortable room.

Recovering and emerging into the Neapolitan sunlight, Jim immediately encounters an old flame (ten years have drifted by), with whom he is still in love, and for whom he develops a hasty and unwise obsession. Hasty for all the usual reasons, and because she, too, has apparently kept a light burning under her own passion for Jim. Unwise because said flame is now married to an older man; an older, very serious, very powerful and domineering man, who is also a senior judge at the height of a major Mafia trial.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP