The Monster of Florence
by Douglas Preston
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Book Reviews of The Monster of Florence
Book Review: "In Florence the sublime and terrible go hand in hand."
Summary: 4 Stars
"The Monster of Florence," by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi, is the bizarre tale of an Italian Jack the Ripper. The murderer, whose identity is not known to this day, killed fourteen young lovers who had been enjoying trysts in the countryside. In some cases, he cruelly mutilated his female victims. Among the elements that make this case so mind-boggling is that the Italian authorities botched the investigation so thoroughly that it may no longer be possible to obtain justice for the unfortunate victims and their families.
Douglas Preston, a well-known American writer, relocated with his family to Florence with the intention of producing a novel. While conducting research for his project, Preston met "a legendary Tuscan reporter named Mario Spezi, who for more than twenty years had worked...the crime beat at La Nazione, the daily paper of Tuscany." In 2000, while Preston and Spezi chatted in a café, the reporter mentioned "Il Mostro di Firenze." Because of his encyclopedic knowledge of Monster lore, Spezi was dubbed the "Monstrologer." Rumor has it that Thomas Harris based Hannibel Lecter on this sadistic fiend. While Preston listened, his incredulity grew. He learned that between 1974 and 1985, seven couples were murdered in the hills surrounding Florence. This had become "the longest and most expensive criminal investigation in Italian history." Although quite a few people were interrogated, accused, and arrested for these crimes, the cases remained unsolved. Preston and Spezi decided to collaborate on this book, which traces how the authorities mishandled one of the most important homicide investigations in the history of Italian jurisprudence. Lives and reputations were ruined, people were falsely imprisoned, political careers were made and destroyed--and for what? The mystery is not only who committed these atrocious acts of slaughter, but also how the police force of a major European country failed so thoroughly to fulfill its responsibilities.
Preston begins his book with a timeline and lengthy list of characters and concludes with a detailed index. This is not your typical true crime story. The author provides a brief history of Florence--known for its priceless art, stately palaces, and picturesque vistas. It is also the birthplace of the Renaissance, "where the very idea of the modern world" came to fruition. However, Florence is also the city where the mad monk Savonarola tortured "heretics," where Machiavelli wrote "The Prince," and where political rivals brazenly butchered one another. Nowadays, Florence is celebrated more for its past than its present. However, even the most cynical Florentine may find it difficult to believe that one of its own could so cruelly shoot seven young couples in cold-blood.
Without discussing the specifics of the case, suffice it to say that wild rumors and conspiracy theories abounded, but none led to a definitive solution. At one point, Mario Spezi was incarcerated on trumped up charges because of his frank statements criticizing the handling of the investigation. Spezi states that the mind of the Monster of Florence cannot be fully understood, because "madness is the renunciation of all efforts to be understood." A count named Niccolo Capponi warned Douglas to "take care that you and Mario do not poke too vigorously with your sticks into that nest of vipers." Capponi's words turned out to be prescient. Although "The Monster of Florence" is an unusual and intriguing story, it is not without its flaws. There is too much repetition and the narrative becomes a bit tedious as it progresses. Because there is no resolution, many readers may feel frustrated; after all, fiction is often much neater and more satisfying than real life can ever be.
Book Review: The Insanity that can be Italy
Summary: 5 Stars
OK. So the fact that the Italian city states weren't unified into the country we know as Italy until 1861 speaks to a lack of historic organizational structure. And there have been more than sixty government changes at the Prime Minister level since World War II. These elements and more could come into play when examining the chaos that is Italy's judiciary. In Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi's non-fiction account of the "Monster" serial killings around Florence in the 1970s and 1980s, we see that something is horribly, stinking rotten in the core of Italian criminal investigation and prosecution that would take an entire armada of sociologists to understand. To say that fantasy and paranoia drive the actions of even the most senior investigators and judges is to give fantasy and paranoia far too good a name. In a nutshell, why bother going to the heart of the investigation by carefully following evidence that leads to a lone suspect who is a textbook model of a serial killer when you could start a witch hunt that would encompass dozens of people (including a whole village) in a charge of murder as a byproduct of Satanic worship? Without a shred of evidence of course. Why bother taking the most obvious road when you could settle grievances going back decades with spurious charges? Why end the investigation quickly when you could drag it out, garner more publicity, and advance your career?
It is interesting to note that Preston became involved only because he was in Italy doing research for one of his fiction thrillers and just happened to rent a farmhouse next to where one of the murders took place. He started asking questions and was connected with Spezi, a seasoned Italian investigative journalist whose beat was these murders of young couples trysting in the hills around Florence. Spezi's part of the story is told first and he and Preston do a nice job of laying out the basic facts, including the puzzling-then-horrifying actions of the police and judiciary. Spezi's work requires fairly detailed explanations of institutions that don't have true parallels in American society and these were efficiently done. Both he and Preston, who is much better recognized for his fiction, know their craft and all of their skills are on display in this book. I was especially impressed with how much care is taken to ensure that we know the murdered couples and their stories.
Once the story is laid out and we know the extremely large cast of characters (it really helps to have most of their pictures in a section in the middle of the book), the real story of Spezi and Preston can be told and, to other liberty and sanity loving Westerners, it emerges as a nightmare worthy of Orwell. After writing vigorously about the disarray in the investigation, Spezi is arrested as a suspected accomplice to the murders and all of his notes and research are taken, including his work on this book. Luckily for him, he was able to hide a disk that contained much of what we read here. Preston's status as a world-famous writer did not protect him here, either. Since he didn't arrive in Italy until 2000, they couldn't charge him with being directly involved in the murders but they were able to charge him as an accomplice after the fact and ban him from returning to Italy.
This is an absorbing read from beginning to end and a story that really needs to be told. And it is a cautionary tale about running afoul of Italian authorities. The truth may not set you free.
Book Review: Florence as an Italian Backwater
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm not sure what I found more shocking in "The Monster of Florence", the sensational, new book by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi: the brutal murders of a serial killer prowling the Tuscan hills, or a local judiciary that appears to be rife with incompetence and corruption. In fact, it's sometimes hard to separate the fine line between the overreaching ambition of certain judges and police officials (apparently willing to do anything for power), and the dogged, seemingly idiotic, determination with which they pursued any number of disparate lies and half-truths, bogging down an already labyrinthine investigation and resulting in still more deaths, and the ruination of many more lives. You find yourself questioning whether or not these people, in charge of protecting the populace, are actually that heartless and conniving, or can they possibly be that stupid? I suspect it's a little of both, given the number of law enforcement agencies involved, but whatever the case, the most egregious "official" offenders need to be held accountable for their actions.
Because of the outrageous behavior of these authority figures, the atrocities of the Monster of Florence, and the unbelievable chain of events following the crimes, "The Monster of Florence" may sound more like a fictional crime thriller than the terrifying true story that it actually is. Spanning several decades, the book recounts the deaths of a number of young couples viciously murdered in various lovers lane areas in the hills surrounding Florence, the often conflicting efforts of police and journalists as they try and apprehend the killer, and the various aftermaths of their actions. Working for the Italian newspaper, Nazione, reporter Mario Spezi was involved in the case from its beginning, on a boring Sunday morning back in the early seventies. When his co-worker on the crime desk asked him to cover his shift, Spezi hurried to the sight of a double murder and suddenly found himself drawn into an increasingly complex web as more murders and intrigue followed. Aware that the police investigation was seriously flawed, especially as more jurisdictions became involved, Spezi became determined to eventually unmask the killer, despite the efforts of public officials to mislead residents, and deter any theories not aligning with their own. What Spezi obviously didn't count on was the absolute authority with which certain individuals pursued personal goals, which ultimately, did not bode well for the writer.
As luck would have it, bestselling author, Douglas Preston ("Tyrannosaur Canyon", "The Relic", "Dance of Death", "Brimstone") moved his family to Italy and was working on a new novel. During his research on the novel, Preston found himself meeting with Spezi and the whole story of the Monster of Florence unfolded. Intrigued, Preston became involved in Spezi's quest to find the monster, and a whole new chapter opened up, eventually paving the way for this book to be written and published (but not before Spezi was arrested and imprisoned, and Preston interrogated and virtually thrown out of Italy).
"The Monster of Florence" is both exciting and inciting; it's unputdownable and it makes one yearn for true justice to be done in this case.
Book Review: Murder Under the Tuscan Night
Summary: 5 Stars
As a rule, I don't care for serial killer books or films -- they just don't interest me the way "regular" crime stories do. Common motivations such as jealousy and greed, when handled well, can be more than powerful enough to sustain a character or drive a plot. The twisted psychoses of serial killers just don't do it for me. That said, this nonfiction account of a real life serial killer in Italy, and the investigation that followed in his wake, makes for some very compelling reading. The reason has far less to do with the killer's grisly trail of bodies, than it does with the crazy ins and outs of the investigation and how the authors end up on the wrong end of it all.
Preston is a bestselling thriller writer who moved to Italy to research and write a novel revolving around great flood that struck Florence in 1966. By chance, he learned that an olive grove adjacent to the farmhouse he rented was the site of one of the crimes performed by a notorious serial killer. Intrigued, he met the veteran Italian crime journalist who would become his collaborator on this book, and started to learn everything he could about the case. And with a series of killings stretching from 1968-85, there was a lot to learn. Fortunately, Preston does a pretty good job of untangling the case and laying it out for the reader (albeit, with some repetitions).
What many readers will find extremely interesting is the relatively insulated nature of the Italian justice system, and how in this case, insulation from external oversight led to some absolutely colossal failures of investigation, not to mention outright corruption. Those with an interest in Italy may find some rather interesting insights into Italian national character along the way, such as the concept of saving face and the notion that it is vital to be "in the know" or "savvy" (which means not taking anything at surface value, no matter how plausible it may be). Some of these characteristics are what lead to Preston and Spetzi becoming targets of the serial killer investigation, leading the entire story into Kafkaesque farce. (At times, Preston goes a little overboard in describing his own fear of being prosecuted, especially when some of problems are of his own making. For example, if the police in a foreign country say that you have a right to have an interpreter and a lawyer present at your questioning, take them up on it!)
Ultimately, some readers may be somewhat frustrated by the lack of a clear "solution" or resolution to the crimes -- although the authors do point a very plausible finger at one man. And some aspects of the situation aren't very well explained -- such as why the Italian media would sometimes have an insatiable appetite for anything relating to the case, and other times appear not care. Finally, at times, the ineptitude of the Italian cops and prosecutors is so extreme that it strains credulity Nonetheless, this remains a fascinating true crime book, and one that will severely tax any reader's romantic notions of Tuscany.
Book Review: Stranger than fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
In the annals of crime, the case of the "Monster of Florence" (the name Italian journalist Mario Spezi, one of the co-authors, and one of the key players in the case and this book, gave the killer) is truly one of the strangest. Starting in 1974, and continuing through 1985, seven couples were brutally murdered in the secluded lovers' lanes located in the hills surrounding the city of Florence, Italy. Still unsolved to this day, the crimes captured the horrified attention and imagination of the Italian people, and consumed enormous resources--nearly one hundred thousand men were investigated and more than a dozen arrested during the course of various inquiries into the crimes. Per Douglas Preston's introduction, the investigation "has been like a malignancy, spreading backward in time and outward in space, metastasizing into different cities and swelling into new investigations, with new judges, police, and prosecutors, more suspects, more arrests, and many more lives ruined."
Not merely a recounting of those grisly crimes and endless investigations, The Monster of Florence (hereafter TMOF) is also an engrossing biographical piece, detailing the toll the case took on both its authors, who, in one of the stranger twists in a case replete with strange twists, become the focus of the ongoing police investigation. Thus, in a plot complication worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, the reporters became part of the very story they are covering--after his home is ransacked in a search, Spezi is subsequently arrested, and his collaborator, American crime novelist Preston, is harshly interrogated by the authorities. In a movie, the protagonists would have been able to clear their names by dramatically unmasking the real killer, unearthing a piece of key evidence at the last moment. Real life, however, proves to a bit more complicated, and certainly more bizarre.
The back cover copy of the advance reading copy of TMOF compares it to John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City. The comparison is apt, but only to a point, as both these non-fiction works feel more like novels. TMOF, on the other hand, feels more like the product of journalists than novelists (certainly not surprising, given the backgrounds of its respective creators), calling to mind books like Jimmy Breslin's outstanding .44, or Vincent Bugliosi's memorable Helter Skelter. That's not to say it's any less gripping because of that tendency; in fact, in might have made the book all the more immediate and enthralling, because, in this instance, the strange facts in this case alone are enough to capture and hold any reader's attention.