Kill the Father

Book excerpt: In this fascinatingly complex thriller, two people, each shattered by their past, team up to solve a series of killings and abductions—unspeakable crimes that turn out to be merely the surface of something far more sinister. When a woman is beheaded in a park outside Rome and her six-year-old son goes missing, the police arrest the woman’s husband and await his confession. But the city’s Chief of Major Crimes has his doubts and assigns two of Italy’s top analytical minds to the case: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli, a fierce, warrior-like detective still reeling from a horrific mass killing she survived, and Dante Torre, a man who spent his childhood trapped inside a concrete silo. Fed through the gloved hand of a masked kidnapper who called himself “the Father,” Dante emerged from his ordeal with crippling claustrophobia but, also, with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. All evidence suggests that the Father is back at work and wants a reunion with Dante. But when Colomba and Dante begin unraveling the truth, they find themselves wanted for murder. Now Dante and Colomba must travel down a number of dark tunnels, both literal and figurative, as they confront the question that may solve it all: what lies beneath the water in a remote Italian quarry? And what might that revelation mean for ten children who have recently gone missing? Kill the Father boasts a brilliantly layered plot that offers new and more haunting revelations at every turn. Not since Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs has there been as intriguing a pairing of hard-charging female detective and “damaged” savant, and not since Jo Nesbo has there been a foreign thriller talent as promising.