The Monster of Florence
by Douglas Preston
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Book Reviews of The Monster of Florence
Book Review: Spellbinding read, happy to recommend for readers who have an interest in true crime
Summary: 5 Stars
Just inside the front cover is a timeline, I found it most useful for those, including myself, who may not have an awareness of the events set down on the pages of The Monster of Florence. The timeline helped me keep everything in order as I read the work.
Subsequent to the timeline is a cast of names for those the reader will meet in the book. I like the system. Again, because I had no awareness of the serial murderer who was killing in Florence, Italy the list helped me keep the times, places and people straight. This serial killer, the events, or the people involved is not one I was aware of prior to reading The Monster of Florence.
While the facts surrounding the killings are factual; The Monster of Florence is not so much a sensational recounting of an appalling set of murders as it is a recounting of the men who have spent years investigating, researching, and trying to put the murders into perspective before beginning to write their findings into a book.
Part 1 is The Story of Mario Spezi. In 1981 Spezi, an Italian, was a young member of the press in Florence where he worked for La Nazione. He had held the post for several years. Spezi had no realization how his life might transform when he noticed a fellow reporter approaching his desk one Sunday. It was the journalist who usually handled the crime desk. The man was a phenomenon having worked and survived two decades covering the Mafia.
Spezi was asked to cover the crime desk for his coworker who had a family matter to take care of that day. His parting words would linger often in Spezi's memory: 'nothing ever happens in Florence on a Sunday morning.'
And, Spezi did hang around the paper until just about noon, his co-worker was correct, it was quiet as could be. Then, he determined to go and check out the local police station. While there he learned something indeed had happened. And, from that day onward Spezi's life was never the same. He was continually searching for answers regarding the subject of a most ghastly murder which quickly became murders in short order.
For 165 pages we follow Spezi in his pursuit to determine who The Monster of Florence really is.
Part 2 is The Story of Douglas Preston. Preston, an American writer, had long wanted to compose a murder mystery set in the period of the 1966 Florentine flood when the Arno River overflown its banks following forty days of rain.
Arriving in Florence in 2000 were Preston, his wife and two young children. It was not long before Preston learned that he had come right into to the heart of Monster country. He as Spezi was quickly caught up in a search for the truth. And he and Spezi soon joined forces and their investigation spanned years.
Near Florence, for over a decade the executioner killed and disfigured fourteen people. His killings included both members of seven couples he found in parked cars late at night. He was a serial killer who ritually murdered fourteen young lovers before he stopped. He is known as the Monster of Florence. And, he has never been caught.
The Monster of Florence is a particularly alarming book for the reason that it gives an account of definite horrendous crimes and is not a work of fiction.
Thomas Harris, an American novelist of crime narratives, even studied Florentine Monster data for some of Hannibal Lecter's more outrageous moments in his book featuring Hannibal. Most conspicuously Harris wrote The Silence of the Lambs.
One of the most interesting of elements found on the pages of The Monster of Florence is the twist of irony that has also faced more than one reporter or researcher of true crime; Preston and Spezi themselves became targets of a out of the ordinary police investigation.
The murders, which continue to be unsolved even to today, caught the dismayed notice and thoughts of the Italian people, especially those who lived in and around Florence. The Monster of Florence is a captivating peek into the management and mis management of one of the largest investigations into a series of grisly killings which stunned and concerned the populace of Italy as well as the situation continues to cause worry and shock today.
The Monster of Florence is the explanation of the investigation undertaken by Spezi and Preston for--and identification of--the man Spezi and Preston are persuaded did in fact commit the unspeakable crimes. Included in the book is a recounting of the chilling interview Spezi and Preston conducted with him.
Well written, factual, The Monster of Florence is not a true crime account in the strictest sense because the books centers more the writers and what their research shows than it does on the murders themselves.
Spellbinding read, happy to recommend for readers who have an interest in true crime and how the investigation into it can go awry.
Molly Martin
Reviewer
Book Review: "Inside Of Me, The Night Will Last Forever"
Summary: 5 Stars
In the Sixties and Seventies of the last century, the late Scottish-born novelist Muriel Spark, then living in Rome and Florence, wrote four novels with Italian settings: The Public Image (1968); The Driver's Seat (1970,) in which a deranged young woman actively searches for a man to violently murder her while vacationing in Italy; The Takeover (1976), which accurately predicted the social changes in the world that was to come; and Territorial Rights (1979), set in Venice.
Spark, best known for the far tamer The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), was a moral satirist, and her Italian novels depict greed, envy, betrayal, extortion, blackmail, adultery, rape, robbery, pan-sexual promiscuity, rampant paranoia, prostitution, and violence as routine components of daily life in that country in all tiers of society (to be fair, Spark also identified many of these elements as existing equally in the British Isles in other novels).
Spark eventually settled in the village of Civitella della Chiana outside of Florence, and lived there for several more decades until her death in 2006, so she presumably knew her subject thoroughly.
World-famous Italian film director Dario Argento has, since The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), created nearly a dozen superb 'giallo' thrillers set in his native country, which frequently locate the root of the killer's psychopathology in the twisted forests of Freudian family romance.
Most viewers have probably assumed Argento's wonderfully bizarre and imaginative films to be little more than effective but dramatically-exaggerated horror films. However, novelist Douglas Preston and journalist Mario Spezi's riveting The Monster of Florence (2008) once again proves the adage that truth is stranger than fiction, and in the case at hand, far stranger, far weirder.
The authors crisply and economically weave a complex, decades-long narrative involving not only a violent Florentine serial killer who preys on young lovers fornicating al fresco, but a thriving nocturnal culture of masturbatory voyeurs, a pair of deadly Sardinian brothers, familial hatred, wife killing, routine adultery, incest, homosexual blackmail, bisexual orgies, vacuous conspiracy mongers given free reign and the public's ear, the use of mentally deficient individuals as key witnesses in court, official charges of Satanism and black masses, spiteful government intimidation of the innocent, wrongful imprisonment, and gross police misconduct on the grandest scale imaginable.
The subtext of this extraordinary story seems to be: visit Florence, visit Italy, at your own risk, as the irrational psychology and limited intelligence of the average Italian citizen is almost as dangerous to your wellbeing as that of the country's most aggressive psychopath.
Obsessions with 'saving face,' status, and the Italian concept of 'furbo,' a combination of envy, personal insecurity, profound cynicism, perceptual coarseness, shallow emotions, and suspicion, rule the day. And in the Italy of The Monster of Florence, "idiots" of all stripes and varieties seem to abound at all levels of society, and in all professions, as nowhere else on the planet.
The depiction of the country in Spark's The Takeover is, by comparison, like The Garden of Eden Before The Fall.
As the narrative procedes, both Preston and Spezi are eventually suspected of either being the actual 'Monster of Florence' or working closely with him, not necessarily because officials felt either was guilty or a particularly good candidate, but simply to pay the pair back for essentially mocking them and their absurd, largely groundless conspiracy theories in public.
If the book has a weakness, it is that Spezi's candidate for the actual Monster of Florence, while highly plausible and backed by a fair amount of circumstantial evidence and witness testimony, doesn't seamlessly fit the killer's profile in the air-tight manner readers might prefer.
That profile, which was developed in conjunction with the American FBI, describes the killer as sexually impotent, and no evidence of such a condition is presented or established other than in theory. On the contrary, Spezi's candidate, who is described in physically attractive, masculine terms, comes across in the text, when interviewed face-to-face, as relaxed, confident, and secure in his identity as a male and as a human being.
Additionally, Preston and Spezi's very-late-in-the-game faith that the corrupt, clearly hostile police and carabinieri would respond fairly, favorably, and rationally to the pair's apparent discovery of the killer's lair, where the 'monster' kept the murder weapon and 'trophies' of flesh cut from the victims secreted for decades, seems both implausible and naïve.
Book Review: Murder Italian Style
Summary: 3 Stars
When novelist Douglas Preston moved his family to the Florence countryside he expected to immerse himself in the very culture he planned to feature in his next thriller. Early on, however, Preston's research brought him into contact with Mario Spezi, an Italian crime reporter who was expert in the ways of Italian police investigations, and Preston's life was changed forever.
Spezi mentioned that Preston's new home was within a stone's throw of one of the more infamous murder scenes in recent Florence history and that the double murder was almost certainly the work of a serial killer yet to be identified. Spezi, as it turned out, had made his reputation as a journalist by becoming an expert on the murders and was obsessed with finally determining the killer's identity. As the two talked, Preston became more and more taken with Spezi's story and decided to postpone his new thriller until after he and Spezi had written a book together about "The Monster of Florence."
By the time Preston and Spezi teamed up to investigate the crimes for their book, it had been more than ten years since the last murders. The Monster, between 1968 and 1985, had killed seven couples as they made love in their cars or campers while parked in out-of-the-way sites around Florence. In a fashion similar to England's Jack the Ripper, he mutilated the bodies of his female victims, even carrying away body parts as trophies or reminders of his crimes.
Unfortunately for Preston and Spezi, they soon found themselves in conflict with various members of the Italian crime investigation establishment, some of whose members had used the murders to make their reputations and advance their own careers. More than one person had been charged with the murders over the years as diverse theories, ranging from satanic cults to medically trained or aristocratic killers, were trotted out for the benefit of the public. Sadly, according to Preston and Spezi, those responsible for solving the crimes were so anxious to pin them on any likely suspect that they were willing to create evidence as needed, ignore any conflicting real evidence, coerce testimony from known informants, and ruin the lives of anyone who fell into their path if that would help close the case.
Preston and Spezi could hardly believe what they discovered about Italian criminal investigators, prosecutors and judges. Successive investigators built case after case against men who fit their preconceived ideas of how and why the murders occurred. It was all so ludicrous and, most importantly, so corrupt, that the two pushed on with their own investigation long enough to place themselves squarely in opposition to official investigators. As a result, Spezi himself was eventually charged with, and tried for, the very crime he had a spent a lifetime investigating and Preston was threatened with arrest if he ever returned to Italy. Italian authorities knowing how many lives had been ruined and how many reputations built on false investigations greatly feared the publication of Preston and Spezi's book and seem to have charged Spezi with murder mainly in order to suppress it.
"The Monster of Florence" should have been a horrifying and fascinating true crime thriller because of the nature of the crimes, how long they went on, how difficult it has been to identify the killer, and the inept, fraudulent, and almost comical investigation so terribly bungled by Italian authorities. But, because of the dry style in which the book is written (more the style of a newspaper article than a book), even a story filled with as many horrifying elements as this one becomes more boring than thrilling. The second part of the book, in which Preston and Spezi recount what happens when they themselves become suspects rather than reporters moves at a more lively pace but it leads to an ending that likely will disappoint most readers.
The audio version of "The Monster of Florence" is competently read for the most part but one aspect of the audio book quickly grows into a distracting annoyance. Much of the book is written in conversational form encompassing direct quotes from those involved and, although these quotes are naturally reproduced in English rather than in Italian, they are delivered in such an atrocious (and stereotypical) Italian accent that they are sometimes difficult to understand even in English. The result is that every Italian character begins to sound like every other Italian character in a book already filled with names that, for the non-Italian speaker, can already be difficult to distinguish one from the other. This makes listening to the audio version of "The Monster of Florence" into a tedious experience that might possibly be avoided by reading the book the old fashioned way.
Regardless, this one is not quite what it could have been.
Book Review: A chilling tale of true evil
Summary: 4 Stars
Recently, I seem to be reading a lot of books centered in and around the Italian city of Florence, treasured for centuries as the birthplace of the Renaissance. Everywhere there is art to behold, from paintings, sculpture and to architecture, and tourists crowding the city for the galleries and shopping. To the casual observer, it may just seem like a slice of heaven on earth.
But long-term residents know better. Between 1968 and 1985 eight double murders occurred, all of young lovers, with the female member of the pair brutally mutilated. One of the first reporters to hear of the crime was Mario Spezi, and through the years, he followed the crimes and the many stories of just who the Monster could be. He carefully assembled his notes, and wondered along with everyone else as to just who the killer was, dubbed The Monster by the press and the authorities.
American author Douglas Preston traveled to Italy with his wife and two of his children in 2000, living in a farmhouse near Florence. He was busy working on a new mystery novel, but kept getting sidetracked by the mystery of the Monster. A mutual friend introduced him to Mario Spezi, and very soon both men were good friends and investigating the riddle of the murders. Over the years they kept at the mystery, and soon they were discovering that the truth was very different than what the police and the carabinieri were saying what happened...
The narrative is broken up into two parts, the first half of the book centered around Spezi, and the general investigation, and the trials and suspects that well, weren't that credible. Spezi kept writing about the case, but the public and the press all seemed to want the more sensationalistic approach -- including rumours of a satanic cult being responsible, and a common sort of doorstop found in Tuscan homes actually being a 'device to communicate with the infernal regions.' Even a report from the FBI that contradicted the notions that were being reported did nothing to slow down the fantastic, and rather crackpot ideas.
The second half of the book, told from Douglas Preston's point of view, detailing his meeting with Spezi, and with a notable aristocrat of Florence, and his own story. Unlike the first half, this one does have a bit of humour here and there to lighten things up, mostly centered around being a very naive American and trying to learn the language.
About page two hundred or so, the story starts to run off the rails. Spezi has been sparring with the local investigator in the case, Michele Giuttari and Judge Guiliano Mignini, and in a very weird twist, have both Spezi and Preston indicted in the case.
Here is where my blood ran cold, as the reader gets to find out that not only the Italian judicial system impossibly corrupt but that many of the rights that Americans take for granted -- a fair and honest hearing, the right to have an attorney present, to know what you're being charged with and having access to the same evidence that the police and prosecutors do -- well, they simply don't exist in Italy. You can simply be denounced, the police can toss you into jail and there you can rot until they decide to speak to you.
Mario Spezi would go through the worry and humiliation of a prison stay and trial. Douglas Preston would be questioned and threatened with prison, and when he was freed, decided that the best thing to do would be to leave Italy with his family as soon as possible.
What finally happened is a shocker. For Americans, secure in the thought that we have the right to know, to be able to face our accusers openly, this is a very rude awakening. As to the real identity of the Monster, there are hints as to who he might be, but I fear that the truth will never be known.
A collection of black and white photos give faces to the principal players in the story, along with a map of Florence, with the sites of the murders marked. An index is included as well.
A warning -- the descriptions of the murders are brief, but very graphic, so this story is not for the faint of heart. What I came away with from this story was a sense of sorrow for the victim's families, a great deal of anger at the level of incompetence of the Italian officials, and thanking god that I live in a country where law at least has a fighting chance. Sometimes.
Four stars overall, and recommended, but only for those who enjoy true crime stories. Not for the squeamish.
Book Review: Chilling, horrific - and true
Summary: 5 Stars
Romantic Florence, a place nearly every visitor to Italy is passionate about. Yet a city blessed with such splendor and steeped in so much culture still has a dark side. "Even at the height of the Renaissance, beauty mingled with blood, civilization with savagery, in this city of paradox and contradiction."
Beginning sometime in 1968 or 1974, depending upon which authority you listen to, a killer --- or killers --- brutally murdered young couples as they made love under the new moon on secluded lovers' lanes around Florence. The murders went on until 1985, gripping Florentines in an unaccustomed terror. The crimes were so horrific that the press dubbed him Il Mostro di Firenze, or The Monster of Florence.
Hundreds of tips flooded the offices of investigators, keeping them very busy chasing down leads. Wives turned in husbands, shopkeepers pointed at rivals, cousins accused each other, and every new arrest gave residents hope. Dozens of suspects were paraded into the interrogation rooms with an impressive number of them tried and convicted, only to be released when the Monster killed again. Far from being discouraged, the police headed off in another direction, as sure of the accuracy of their newest theory as they had been of the previous one.
Over a decade after the last victims were found slaughtered in the hills, American thriller novelist Douglas Preston moved his family to Florence with plans to write a great mystery there. By happenstance --- or maybe divine intervention --- Preston rented a house with a view of one of the scenes of the Monster's double homicides. For a mystery writer, the possibilities this discovery opened up proved simply irresistible, and Preston was soon embroiled in his own investigation of Il Mostro di Firenze.
Italian journalist Mario Spezi had spent years following the cases and had written many articles about them. He hooked up with Preston and led him to the murder sites, opened up his own files to him, and introduced him to people with information. Spezi was elated at finding a new ear and eagerly embarked on a campaign to engender in Preston an enthusiasm equal to his own. It didn't take long for Preston to become irredeemably intoxicated with the story.
What the pair found in their digging pushed them deeper and deeper into the city's most puzzling mystery. They were baffled at how the carabinieri and polizia had conducted the investigation. They were further baffled at how the prosecutor was lured into filing charges against several men despite good alibis. And then still further baffled at the rulings of the magistrates, which seemingly ignored inconvenient evidence.
Finally, Spezi convinced Preston that he had figured out who Il Mostro was. All the evidence he had read and gathered pointed indisputably to one man. That individual was not one of the men who Italian law enforcement had in their sights, and Spezi's journalistic exposition on that point did not make the authorities happy. In fact, it made them unhappy to the point of arresting Spezi for several crimes, even hinting at his involvement in the actual murders. And then their attention turned to Preston. When authorities of a foreign government start to look too closely at your activities, it may be time to reconsider the path you've taken. Preston had to weigh his desire to follow the story with his desire to remain out of prison.
THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE evokes a harsh contrast of gruesome crime scenes with the stunning background of Tuscany. It seems impossible that the bucolic hills could hold sinister secrets of such horrors. Preston and Spezi reveal the reality of living in Italy, with all of its quaint charm and its imperfect legal system. It's not all capos and Mafia that make the headlines there. It's at least one impotent psychopath with a sick desire to prove his power over other human beings. Not only will the Monster's bloody path horrify you, the treatment of these two authors will, too.
--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers