I read Carofiglio’s Della Gentilezza e del Coraggio, as well Elogio dell’ignoranza e dell’errore and was very pleased by them both, though the second stuck with me a lot more. Carofiglio also writes fiction, and I was curious to see what he could produce. We seem to hold some of the same values, and so I wondered how his fiction would come across.
This is a case of the synopsis not doing the story justice. Rancore follows the story of a detective who is hired to look into the possibility that a widow had something to do with her late husband’s death. It is the late husband’s daughter asking this, and she of the conclusion that the widow, significantly younger than her late husband, did have something to do with it. Doesn’t this all sound cliche? From a writer that isn’t Carofiglio, it certain would be. He mitigates the cliche well – Penelope Spada (the detective) sees that the daughter hiring her is looking for her to drum up evidence to a conclusion she already has, and the detective sees why that is a massive problem. The tone isn’t hard boiled, no one is a femme fatale.
And those are the novel’s virtues. The ending felt a bit unearned in that way that many mysteries are – the protagonists sees a clue that was off screen the whole time and pieces it together. The clues were never there, and so there is no point in feeling surprised by it. In this case, it might be the point (SPOILERS: the accused is innocent, and when the detective finally meets her, she too bucks the stereotypes. But the book would have been better served with their having been no culprit at all).
There were also other threads to the story that I didn’t really know what to do with. Five years prior, the detective was investigating something related to the Freemasons, and it actually brought her tangentially close to the victim of this mystery. Another thread kind of follows a person the protagonist seemingly can’t really bring herself to date, or feel much for, perhaps due to her own recent divorce and struggle with her sexuality.
All the characters were a bit too pensive, bit too pondering and philosophical for my taste in novels.
After finishing the book, I added it to my StoryGraph account only to find out it is the second book in a series. It might explain while parts of the book felt so incomplete to me. I might seek the first one out to see if it takes me on to the third.
Failures in Polymathy 