Guido Guerrieri is a changed man. Handed a troubling medical diagnosis, his usual confidence has been shaken, and even if the jury is out on his condition for just one day, the lawyer will need time to get his mojo back. In addition, Guerrieri gets involved in a case that will lead him to analyze, from no safe distance, the distinction between the facts of a situation and that all too human ability to bend those facts to fit one's own desires. A judge at the height of his brilliant career, Guerrieri's old college friend, turns to him to defend him from a corruption charge, a judge's worst nightmare. With the help and moral support of his buddy, cop Carmelo Tancredi, and a female private investigator, Guerrieri will withstand one plot twist after another and get back on his feet again.

Gianrico Carofiglio (1961, Bari), a prosecutor who specializes in investigations of organized crime, was appointed Consultant to the Italian parliament's Antimafia Commission, and from 2008 to 2013 he served in the Italian Senate. He made his novel-writing debut in 2002 with Involuntary Witness, the first in a series of novels featuring the lawyer Guido Guerrieri, who would also appear in A Walk in the Dark, Reasonable Doubts, Temporary Perfections and now in La regola dell'equilibrio. In 2004 Involuntary Witness and A Walk in the Dark became two television movies directed by Alberto Sironi and starring Emilio Solfrizzi. Carofiglio's other fiction and non-fiction works include the novels The Past is a Foreign Country (2005 Bancarella Prize), made into the 2008 film of the same name by Daniele Vicari, starring Elio Germano and Michele Riondino; and The Silence of the Wave (2011), which made the 2012 Strega Prize shortlist. In 2007, Carofiglio co-wrote the graphic novel Cacciatori nelle tenebre with his brother Francesco. They would work together again on this year's La casa nel bosco. In 2010, Carofiglio wrote La manomissione delle parole, which was adapted for the stage, with the author himself in the cast. In 2013 he published his story La velocità  dell'angelo in the collection Cocaina, which also featured stories by Massimo Carlotto and Giancarlo De Cataldo. Carofiglio's novels have been translated into twenty-four languages and have sold over four million copies in Italy.