Kill the Angel — Sandrone Dazieri

From the wildly inventive mind of thriller master Sandrone Dazieri, whose first novel featuring investigators Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre, KILL THE FATHER, was an international bestseller, comes the ingenious second novel in the series, KILL THE ANGEL.

In Rome, a high-speed train hurtles into the city's main station with a carriage full of dead bodies, the macabre discovery of which falls to Deputy Police Commissioner Colomba Caselli. Subsequently, the police receive a claim of responsibility and the threat of more murders to come. But neither Caselli nor her eccentrically brilliant ally, Dante Torre, are yet ready to buy the terrorist link.

As the two maverick investigators puncture the façade of what the perpetrator wants everyone to believe, they come close to dying several times.

Not for the first time, Dante's bizarre childhood, during which he was kept confined for years in a concrete silo, enables him to see what others miss, and in this case, to connect with a kindred spirit of sorts, a woman named Giltine who experienced an equally bizarre childhood from which she emerged damaged, lethal, and full of murderous intent.

Adding to Giltine's eerie fierceness is that, as the victim of a rare mental illness, she believes she's already dead. She's unacquainted with fear. And that makes her the most formidable foe Colomba and Dante have faced yet.

As the story climaxes, the duo finds themselves utterly on their own, on the outs with law enforcement and the only ones with a chance to make sure the waters of Venice don't turn red with blood.