Sergeant Mirko Stankovic has been ‘exiled’ to a remote village between the mountains of Sardinia’s Barbagia region and the sea, where nothing ever happens. He’s always been allergic to the rules, and after breaking his last, he’s been punished with this transfer. When he sets foot in his new office in Santa Lucia, which looks like an eatery’s cellar more than police premises, he starts thinking that his life full of action and excitement is behind him. Not yet, it turns out: a few days later, the body of woman is found inside a cave, half submerged in water. The victim, Marcella Ferrante, was the daughter of a local businessman, Manuel Ferrante, owner of one of the most exclusive clubs on the Costa Smeralda. Elias Mandreu was born in Nuoro in 1968, in 1969, and in 1973: a man with three lives, one as a public administrator, one as a magistrate, and in the third, a mechanical engineer. In all three of these existences, Elias Mandreu is also an author, whose novels Nero riflesso and Dopotutto were published by Maestrale, and whose stories appear in two anthologies published by Piemme: Giallo Sardo and Giallo sardo 2, edited by Francesco Abate.

It’s a special night at the Savoy, one of Milan’s most exclusive hotels: fifty hand-picked guests will have the honor of joining the party thrown by MP Vincenzo Greco to celebrate the end of the EXPO and the start of a massive road project. Right in the middle of the festivities, however, a storm knocks out the lights, and the suite holding the party plunges into darkness. When the lights go back on, there is the politician, dead in the pool. With the security cameras disactivated and cell phones dead, technology is not going to solve this one. Another approach is called for: logic, observation, intuition – the old-school way of investigating. Which is why this highly sensitive case, given the victim, goes to Luca Botero, aka Amish: the technophobe police inspector who lives in a time warp, like he’s back in the 1970s. A novelist, journalist, and scriptwriter, Paolo Roversi lives in Milan. His two-volume Città rossa about the history of the Milan underworld in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, was published in 2015 by Marsilio: Milano criminale and Solo il tempo di morire (2015 Selezione Bancarella Award, 2015 Garfagnana in giallo Award). The same publisher brought out the series featuring the reporter/hacker Enrico Radeschi, ten novels to date, the most recent being Il pregiudizio della sopravvivenza (2021), L'eleganza del killer (2022), and L'ombra della solitudine (2024). In 2023, Inspector Luca Botero first appeared in Alla vecchia maniera (Mondadori, 2023) along with Scerbenanco entry Una morte onorevole. Previously, in 2020, Roversi’s Psychokiller (SEM) won the Readers’ Prize for the Giorgio Scerbenanco Award. He contributes to newspapers and magazines and has written treatments for TV series and short films. Roversi is the founder and director of the NebbiaGialla Suzzara Noir Festival and the web portal MilanoNera.

On the night of September 3rd, 1992, on the boat ride across the placid Lake Iseo, Pietro Rota sees the impressive silhouette of Montisola rear up after twelve years away. He had run off to Milan, with the aim of becoming a successful journalist, but things didn’t play out the way he hoped. This is not the triumphal homecoming he always dreamed of: he had simply responded to his father’s call for help. Emilio Ercoli, the richest man on the island, has been brutally murdered, and the investigators are leaning towards Nevio Rota. There was bad blood between the two men, it was well known, and several clues led straight to the latter. Convinced his father is innocent, Pietro starts his own informal probe to prove it, together with an old friend, traffic warden Cristian Bonetti. Jacopo De Michelis was born in Milan and lives in Venice, where he works as an editor at Marsilio Editori. He has been a translator, editor of anthologies, editorial consultant, and teacher of narratology at NABA in Milan. A photography fan, he publishes his shots on Instagram as @geidiemme. In 2022, his first novel, La stazione, was published by Giunti.

The powerful Swiss broker Rufus Blom, on his usual dawn run in the hills of the Langhe, comes across the body of a young woman. On her back, the killer has left a message written in blood: a swastika and a surname. His: Blom. Few clues in the vicinity and big problems for Inspector Gualtiero Bova, nicknamed the Penguin and only recently transferred to Mondovì. Nobody seems to know who the girl is, or why her corpse was used to send a threatening message to Blom. The Penguin may have landed in these hills as a punishment, an exile disguised as a promotion, but he's not the kind of person to let that get him down. Out he goes with his faithful basset hound Gilda and his pipe, to figure out who the victim was and what her link was to the Blom family, which seems to have its share of secrets. Orso Tosco was born in Ospedaletti and lives in Liguria’s “Far West”. A writer, poet, and screenwriter, he works with l’Officina del Podcast. His novel Aspettando i naufraghi (2018) and another co-written with Cosimo Argentina, Dall'inferno. Due reportage letterari (2021), were published by minimum fax, as was London voodoo (2022). In 2023, his book Nanga Parbat. L’ossessione e la montagna nuda came out with 66thand2nd. A collection of Tosco’s poetry, Figure amate, was published by Interno Poesia in 2019.

After reconnecting with her mother, who had abandoned her, Inspector Nives Bonora is ready to come to terms with her past and a painful secret she has learned. But the answers she seeks will have to wait for who knows how long, since a young woman’s disappearance thrusts Nives into a new case, in a new city, and with a new team. A serial killer is on the loose in Bologna, and the victims are exclusively young women with red hair; no witnesses or security cameras ever emerge. The search for the solution forces the inspector to immerse herself in the obsessions of a homicidal maniac as she combs the flat countryside around the city and the streets of Bologna, hotel rooms abruptly vacated, and underground parties with their dark ambient music, plus the possible figments of her own imagination – and that of a ruthless killer. Cinzia Bomoll has Romani roots on her mother’s side and grew up in Bologna, where she received a degree in literature before moving to Rome, New York, and the Mojave Desert in California, then returned to Bologna, where she lives today. A writer of stories since she was very young, she made her literary debut with a story in the collection Quello che ho da dirvi (Giulio Mozzi, Einaudi, 1998). She has published the novels Lei che nelle foto non sorrideva (Fazi, 2006), 69 (Fazi, 2011), Cuori a spigoli (Ianieri, 2019), and Non dire gatto (Ponte alle Grazie, 2023). Also a screenwriter (winner of the 2020 Solinas Award) and film and television director, Bomoll has made three feature films: Il segreto di Rahil (2007), Let’s Dance (2010), and La California (2022), this last selected for the Freestyle section of the 17th Rome Film Fest.

Florian Kaufman, an engineer, dreams of setting up an ethical enterprise in Brazil. Being Swiss, he assumes that his logical mind will help him in this endeavor, but he soon finds himself up against the hostility of those who classify him as a “gringo”, a foreigner, plus inept police officers and a crime ring ready and willing to pay him off, or worse. Page after page, Kaufman’s initial faith in justice vacillates as he discovers a shadow reality. Especially when he finds himself catapulted into a case of murder, for which he’s been framed, and then into an ethical dilemma that challenges his morality and his dreams. Carlo Calabrò was born in Palermo and studied bio-engineering in Milan and Paris. His career as a consultant, banker, and entrepreneur took him to countries all around the world to live, and he spent eleven years in Brazil. Thanks to this experience, in 2011 he published, together with his father, Antonio, the book Bandeirantes. Il Brasile alla conquista dell'economia mondiale (Laterza). He next moved to New York, became a screenwriter, and won an award at the Vortex Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror Film Festival. In 2024, his first novel, Meccanica di un addio, was published by Marsilio and shortlisted for the Giorgio Scerbanenco Award at this year’s Noir in Festival.