REASONABLE DOUBTS, third Guido Guerrieri procedural set in Bari, Italy

REASONABLE DOUBTS
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO (Guido Guerrieri #3) {tr. Howard Curtis}
Bitter Lemon Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Lawyer Guerrieri is asked to handle the appeal of Fabio Paolicelli, sentenced to sixteen years for smuggling drugs into Italy. Everything seems stacked against the accused, not least because he initially confessed to the crime. His past as a neo-fascist thug also adds credence to the case against him. Only the intervention of Paolicelli’s beautiful half-Japanese wife finally overcomes Guerrieri’s reluctance. Matters get more complicated when Guerrieri ends up in bed with her. Gianrico Carofiglio, born in 1961, is a judge and anti-Mafia prosecutor in the southern Italian city of Bari. Bitter Lemon Press introduced him to English-speaking readers with his best-selling debut novel, Involuntary Witness.

Book One review — Book Two review — Book Four review — Book Five review

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My Review: Third in the Guido Guerrieri Italian legal procedural thrillers, this outing finds Avv. Guerrieri tilting at windmills again, with a twist: He's running an investigation into the client's story. He's taken the case of an imprisoned drug courier who insists he's innocent of knowingly transporting 40 kilos of cocaine from Montenegro back to Bari in the car carrying himself, his wife, and their small daughter. He was a small-time crook before, yes, and (unknown to the client) was even a nasty Fascist gang-bully in the 1970s who beat young Guido up in the street. But to imperil his own wife and daughter by doing something so stupid as to run a hundred pounds of cocaine across international borders?! Never!

But word in the prison-yard is that Avv. Guerrieri is a good one, a lawyer who does the job he's hired for, and makes the case work for the client. This time, though, Guido faces something a little bit tougher than just a client probably guilty and just denying it out of embarrassment at involving his family, or even the long-ago beating he got at the client's hands (which the client's clearly forgotten): Don Quixote de Guerrieri has met his Dulcinea, the client's beautiful half-Japanese wife Natsu.

And here Guido Guerrieri is, single and everything, since Margherita left for New York and a new life (the rat!). And here Natsu is, unsure of her husband's innocence, unsure of her future, unsure of how to tell her daughter that Papa's not coming home from his business trip until 2025...what can you expect a woman to do when a handsome older gent with sad eyes and a penchant for reading strange books, a sophisticated palate that can really appreciate her cooking, and a way with soothing her deeply unhappy daughter's nightmares falls into her lap?

In the end, as always, Guido sees justice served, and sees his services amply rewarded in the process by solidifying his excellent reputation among the criminal classes, with the local narcotics officers, and the Italian judiciary, all at the same time. Not for the first time, Carofiglio weaves a believable resolution to a plot he seems to have set in motion specifically to challenge the clockwork universe into crushing our Don Quixote hero with the windmill blades.

At the end of the last book, Guido and Margherita were celebrating Christmas together! He'd even jumped out of a plane to impress her! And in one short passage at the very beginning of this book, Carofiglio dispatches her to the same place that all happy-making things go in the lives of hard-boiled sleuths. I was a little bit surprised at first, then I remembered the cardinal rule of noir: No one is happy for long.

A doomed affair with a client's wife is a great noir touch, too. No one even moderately sentient can doubt for a second that, once Natsu appears, Guido's going to succumb to her and that she's going to offer up the goods. All progresses apace, and the expected complications ensue; and perhaps that's why this installment isn't quite so thrilling to me as the previous two. I suspect that the far greater emphasis on the investigative parts of the case as opposed to the actual court arguments and examinations might contribute to my lack of superhappy. But the elements are there, just in smaller proportion to previous outings. All I can hope is that the series doesn't become all PI instead of procedural.

I really like the translations of these books, I must say, since they give me credit for being intelligent enough to need the occasional reinforcement of the book's Italian setting by using actual Italian in some non-critical but very practical ways. My favorite example is the characters calling each other, when culturally necessary for them to do so, by their job titles, eg Guido being called "Avvocato" or "Lawyer-man" in professional contexts, exactly as they would in Italy. Grace notes like this are very important to my sense of pleasure in a book, and greatly enhance my willingness to read more of the series.

I continue to enjoy these books, and wait eagerly for the next installment. That's saying something from a man whose "to be read" shelf has over 1000 titles on it.