Three young men and one young woman, all more or less the same age, attended the same college and chose the same end - suicide - to escape the clutches of the crisis gripping the suburbs of an industrious metropolis, devouring all possible futures. But is there more to the incident? Inspector Remo Jacobi, worried about his beloved father Johan and grappling with old nightmares, is catapulted into a world of adolescents not at all familiar to him. And the hunt for the killer he’s been assigned becomes a pilgrimage among past miseries and present-day nightmares of mankind adrift: from dealing with heart-broken parents, a family friend too attractive to be entirely innocent, and the school staff, he will shed any residual illusion on the prospects for today’s youth. When a new death risks upsetting Jacobi’s already precarious mental health, his assistant Borghesi carries on the investigation of what appears to be a tidy case. But, as always, the revelatory details are lurking in the darkest areas of the design.

Massimo Gardella (1973) lives in Milan and translates essays and novels for diverse Italian publishing companies. In 2009 he published the novel Il Quadrato di Blaum. As a musician, he scored Giorgio Fornoni’s documentary Ai confini del mondo. Il male quotidiano, in which Inspector Remo Jacobi appeared for the first time, won a Special Mention from the Scerbanenco Prize jury in 2012.