The German Client: A Bacci Pagano Investigation
Many of the features of this suspenseful, hard-boiled Italian noir, set in Genoa in 1944 and the present day, will be familiar to mystery readers, but author Bruno Morchio is so adept that it doesn’t matter. And then come the surprises.
Private investigator Bacci Pagano is a tough guy who cares about people, including a trafficked Ivory Coast prostitute. Bacci is immediately likable as he stands watch outside her hospital room after she’s been tortured and beaten.
In the 1944 plot, Tilde, a young Resistance courier, is betrayed by an informer, taken into custody, but inexplicably released by the Germans. Genoa Resistance leaders then ask her to bed the German officer who is obviously attracted to her.
The two stories begin to touch one another after an elderly German asks Bacci to trace his brother, who the German has never met. The brother is the son of his father, an officer in World War II, and an Italian woman, Nicla, who was in the Italian Resistance. This potential German client offers Bacci so much money that the private eye cannot refuse. The undead past then twists itself into the present, with Bacci in the middle.
Part of the pleasure of this mystery was in how the author, a psychologist who lives in Genoa, made me see the places and the sense of that ancient city, its politics and culture. Morchio gets his characters’ emotions right as well. This, the 15th Bacci mystery, seems to be the first translated into English. It’s about time. Hopefully, more will follow.
