The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston & Mario Spezi (3.5)
During 11 years (1974-1985), in the beautiful tourist city
of Florence, Italy, someone murdered 7 sets of lovers. This book follows the crimes
and the cases against several men accused of being the Monster of Florence. The
unique element of this true-crime non-fiction tale is the personal involvement
of both writers. Preston is known for his best-selling fiction novels and Spezi
is a journalist in Florence who followed this case for many years. Eventually
they both get accused of being involved in the murders! While there are quite a
few gory details of the murders, one leaves most distressed about the past and
current ineptitude and outright disdain of the facts and truth by the myriad of
police and judges surrounding this case. I had naively assumed that Florence
would be more modern and fair. But given the amount of people arrested as the
Monster of Florence with absolutely no evidence against them, the system looked
more like something from a early century mob-based Italy. The book was
interesting, though sometimes difficult to follow the Italian names of all the
various participants. The scenes when Preston and Spezi meet their best
candidate for the MOF were particularly chilling – worth reading the book just
for that experience.
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