Sibilla Agostini ended up at the traffic police due to her inability to relate to colleagues and her insubordination at all levels. Yet she is a terribly smart agent, an eccentric investigator, capable of solving all the puzzles she finds herself faced with. Inevitable that upon the arrival of a strange message at the Roman police station a little further south of the Vatican City, inspector Fusco and his collaborator Novellino (but is that really his name?) knock on his door, finding, in order to gain access , a riddle to be solved which luckily Novellino manages to decipher, thus finding himself in front of a scruffy, disheveled girl in a small dark office full of papers including the fine slips that he should record, but which he actually uses to take notes . To complete the picture, packs of snacks and sweets everywhere, the only touch of color in that dimly lit room in which Agostini dedicates himself to crosswords, puzzles and all sorts of games contained in the “Puzzle Week”. Sibilla solves the enigma of the strange message that reached the Police in a flash: there is nothing to be done, she may have a thousand defects, but she is undoubtedly very good. But why did such a brilliant officer end up at the traffic police? You have been in the police force for about seven years, passed the public exam without any problem. In the first two she stands out for her brilliance and acumen and also in the aptitude test, to evaluate her logical-deductive abilities, her response is astonishing: no one ever like her. But alongside so many qualities, you also deploy indolence, inability to concentrate on what you consider unstimulating and a total lack of respect towards any kind of authority. So in the space of just six months as a brilliant Homicide agent, after an official warning for calling one of her superiors, Chief Inspector Rinaldi, an “old bastard”, she was thrown into the traffic police department, or rather, it was she who chose him, demanding a private office and granting his consultancy for the most complicated Homicide Squad cases. And this is precisely why Fusco involves her…
The mystery’s invitation for the reader is to test their skills as an investigator, following clues and directions. But it’s not really that simple. Thinking back to the story, it must be distressing, especially for a group of policemen, to know that there will be some murders for which precise indications are given (not exactly clear, to be honest, if it weren’t for agent Agostini) that run throughout the arch of the Zodiac. But even with the young policewoman’s great ability to solve the puzzles, even following the instructions to solve and participate with the protagonists of the mystery in solving the cases (an experience worth trying to discover how important the details are, even the smallest and most apparently meaningless), you can’t get a spider out of the hole. A complex and well-constructed plot and despite the brutality of the crimes, they are already committed and one does not experience the terror and tension of the moment, but rather the desire to find the solution, for which one really transforms oneself into policemen, with the attention to the event itself, to the possible clues, perhaps precisely to the desire to understand better, to identify details and peculiarities, to give a face to the serial murderer. But the problem, perhaps, comes precisely from this: deviated from what is written in a mysterious diary in installments throughout the book, which will only be revealed at the end, we think and suspect others. Codes, rebuses, anagrams, indications through tarot cards sometimes combined with each other, sometimes cut for effect: the murderer has it in for fortune tellers, astrologers, alleged magicians to whom people totally trust and entrust themselves totally, above all, your choices and your life. A story that captures, in short, decidedly particular characters, for a mystery to be read in one sitting, allowing it to challenge us, page after page.
