The Root of All Evil - Hardcover

Costantini, Roberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1623658810 ISBN 13: 9781623658816

Publisher: Quercus, 2015

Synopsis

In the 1960s, post-colonial Libya fell prey to the sprawling industrial greed of the West, driven by the discovery of oil. While the modern quarter of Tripoli, built by the Italians, was small and affluent, the rest of the city--like the rest of the nation--was left to fend for itself amid the arid, sandy stretches of North Africa. As tensions mounted between eastern and western ideals, terror began to supplant justice, and acts of religiously motivated violence began to fill some of Tripoli's darkest corners.

Against this backdrop, the teenaged Michele Balistreri--a smart young man plagued by thuggish tendencies and a youthful attraction to Fascism--suffered a succession of personal blows that would scar him for life: the death of his mother; a terrible tragedy that befell his best friend's family; and the consequences of his father's role in Gaddafi's rise to power. Worst of all, an innocent blood pact he made as a teenager would come to haunt him as an adult.

Four decades later, journalist Linda Nardi is hard at work investigating the shadowy history of the Vatican Bank's involvement in Libya when she suddenly finds her attention diverted to an irresistible story assignment: covering the collapse of Colonel Gaddafi's forty-two year dictatorship.

It is only a matter of time before Nardi's research and Balistreri's investigative work as a police commissario bring them into contact. Together they unearth a deadly conspiracy that goes to the top of Rome's power structure that neither of them will ever be able to forget.

About this title

About the Author

Roberto Costantini was born to Italian parents in Libya, where he spent the first eighteen years of his life. He was educated as a mechanical engineer, and also earned an MBA from Stanford University. After a thirty-year career working for American companies in many different countries, he is now a manager of the LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, where he also teaches Leadership and Negotiation in the MBA program. The Deliverance of Evil was his first novel in a planned trilogy.

From Publishers Weekly

For decades, Michele Balistreri, the volatile veteran detective now heading Rome's homicide squad, has avoided investigating the only murder that really matters to him: his mother's. But the day of reckoning for what befell Italia Balistreri—on a windswept Libyan clifftop hours before the August 1969 coup that installed Muammar Al Gaddafi as the country's dictator—can no longer be dodged in Costantini's suspenseful, at times savage, thriller, the second in his ambitious, politically steeped Evil trilogy (after 2014's The Deliverance of Evil). Investigative journalist Linda Nardi, one of the few individuals Michele cares about, has been digging into a high-stakes fiscal scandal potentially involving several people he has spent a lifetime trying to forget—including his Sicilian industrialist father, Salvatore. Costantini takes his time skillfully planting the twisty, deep-lying roots of his narrative back in Libya, where young "Mike" Balistreri learns about love, brotherhood, and betrayal as well as his own darker side. He grows up with best friend Ahmed Al Bakri, the older son of his father's Libyan right-hand man, and lovely Laura Hunt, the daughter of an American CIA operative. Forty years later, with key figures from this past occupying crucial roles in global politics and business, some long-buried secrets start to explode with deadly consequences—and Linda could be the next victim. Elegant prose and a diabolical plot (including some devilish misdirection) should captivate even readers new to the Balistreri chronicles. (Jan.)\n

About this edition

• Publisher: Quercus
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1623658810
• ISBN 13: 9781623658816
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 720