The Alligator
5 total works
Padua, Italy. An unremarkable man, a husband and father, disappears without a trace. After a few months of searching, the police send his file to the cold cases department to be thrown in with the files of other missing persons. One woman knows the truth about his disappearance, but, being the daughter of a prominent and wealthy Swiss industrialist she fears coming forward with what she knows: that she was his lover and that there is more to his disappearance than another bored suburban husband running out on his. Stricken by guilt, she finally confides in a lawyer who advises her to turn to Marco Buratti, aka The Alligator, for help.
Buratti agrees to assist the woman. Initially, the case of the woman’s missing lover seems like a lost cause, but a clue puts the Alligator and his trusted associates, Max the Memory and Beniamino Rossini, on the trail of the unscrupulous and brilliant criminal, Giorgio Pellegrini, protagonist of The Goodbye Kiss and At the End of a Dull Day.
The deadly game of chicken in which the good guys and the bad guys are often hard to tell apart is Carlotto’s specialty. But good or bad, these men are survivors in a world where the once ironclad criminal codes of conduct are disappearing and new criminal syndicates do vicious battle with old.
A brand new Carlotto, darker than ever...
A robbery goes wrong and ends with a brutal murder. The police investigation turns up nothing. Two years later, Marco Buratti, alias “the Alligator,” is asked to look into the crime and find out who was responsible. Buratti’s employer is young, the youngest client he has ever had; he is only 12 years old, the son of one of the victims. The Alligator senses right from the start that the truth is cloaked, twisted, shocking. Together with his trusted associates, Beniamino Rossini and Max the Memory, he will find himself mixed up in a story of contraband gold and blood vendettas between criminal gangs.
Carlotto once again provides a unique perspective on the criminal and social dynamics that dominate contemporary Italy.
Massimo Carlotto has been described as “the reigning king of Mediterranean noir” (Boston Phoenix), “more noir than even the toughest American noir” (Josh Bazell, author of Beat the Reaper), “about as gritty as they come” (The New York Times), and “the best living Italian crime writer” (Il Manifesto). Here, making his American debut, is Carlotto’s most famous and beloved serial character: ex-con turned private investigator Marco Buratti, a.k.a The Alligator.
Closing the door on a crime ridden past, Marco Buratti plans to spend the rest of his days in the darkness of a seedy nightclub sipping Calvados and listening to the blues. But things don’t quite work out as he planned: though he may be through with his past, his past isn’t through with him. When his gangster friend, Beniamino Rossini’s girlfriend is kidnapped, Buratti is forced to investigate a case of international drug dealing. He will be thrown headfirst into the underworld he had struggled to escape. Here, new and old criminal organizations collide and innocent bystanders are as hard to find as straight cops.
Marco “The Alligator” Buratti is not only one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary crime fiction but also the ideal vivisector of a world in which criminals hold all the cards.
“Carlotto is a master of the genre. He keeps the reader on the edge of his seat until the very end with compact, incisive storytelling.”
—Il Giornale di Vicenza
A woman has gone missing. Her husband, too ashamed to admit to the police that he and his wife were part of a ring of sexual adventurers that organized sadomasochistic orgies, turns instead to the Alligator. Marco, a.k.a the Alligator, enters a depraved demi-world where ferocious deviants prey upon lonely victims. But the savagery of this world is only the first surprise this investigation holds in store for the Alligator. Encountering such violence and desperation triggers memories of his own time in prison. And while the unwritten rule of ex-cons is that you must never talk about your experiences behind bars, the Alligator and his two long-time associates, Max Memory and Beniamino Rossini, are forced to confront demons they thought long buried.
In The Master of Knots, “the reigning king of Mediterranean Noir” Massimo Carlotto gives his readers a work of hardboiled noir fiction that is darker than ever before as he digs into the shadowy corners of human experience. This stunning novel sets a new standard in the history of the Mediterranean Noir novel.