Blues for outlaw hearts and old whores /

The "outlaw hearts" here are a raffish trio of Italian crooks led by Marco Buratti, an amiable rapscallion who keeps interrupting his own narrative to swoon over female jazz singers--Finnish warbler Ina Forsman has his ear now. The "old whore" is Edith, who'd been around a bit before Marco fell in love with her. She had prospered in her youth and, in order to stay desirable as she grew older, focused on gentlemen of a certain age. Now the years have taken their toll, and she's being brutally trafficked. Marco must come to her rescue just as everything is going wrong: the three outlaws are being blackmailed by a government official who is, in turn, a pawn of their enemy, stone killer Giorgio Pellegrini. Marco won't pack his war chest with drug money; he has standards, after all. The story starts slowly, with references only readers of earlier books in the series will know, but it quickly becomes a fine read, with good writing and flashes of oblique humor. What's their business? someone asks. "Extermination," one of his crew deadpans.

In Carlotto's gripping sixth noir featuring PI Marco Buratti to be published in English (after 2016's For All the Gold in the World), Padua, Italy, restaurateur-turned-crook Giorgio Pellegrini wants Buratti, a former blues singer who's trying to put his criminal past behind him, to look into the murders of Pellegrini's wife and mistress, who were tortured before being garroted in the cellar of the man's restaurant. That the day's earnings were untouched indicates that information about Pellegrini, rather than robbery, was the motive for the killings. Shady cop Angela Marino threatens to frame Buratti and his PI partners for cocaine trafficking if they don't cooperate and probe the murders. Their digging reveals that the murders were the result of a carefully planned operation, orchestrated by a shadowy woman following in her father's illegal footsteps. Carlotto makes even minor characters three-dimensional, such as a woman whose face shows that "she'd expected more from life and couldn't figure out why that hadn't come to pass," in this grim tale of violence and corruption. James Ellroy fans will be satisfied. (Feb.)