No flower is born to kill, a new investigation by Giambellino’s Miss Marple: the Sonzogno editions launch with this couplet the latest addition to the mystery writer’s novels Rosa Teruzzifrom the “Tollgate Crimes” series.
The ballad of the unfaithful fathers it is the ninth title, published in April (2024, 160 pages). For brevity, we only mention The missing bridethe first of the detective films with Libera, the Milanese florist and former bookseller and the last, The Traitors’ Waltzalso released by the Sonzogno types in 2016 and 2023.
Rosa Teruzzi, born in Monza (1965), lives and works in Milan. She is an expert in crime news, she is the editor-in-chief of the television program “Quarto Grado” on Retequattro. In addition to the mystery series, you have published three other novels and several short stories. She loves to write in a disused railway toll booth, like the one where her protagonists live.
Libera does not act alone, as fans of the forty-six-year-old volunteer investigator, red-haired and a little emotionally confused, know well. She works in a group, a sort of cooperative with five members, which includes the three-generational family trio of Cairati. She is in the centre, between her mother Iole and her daughter Vittoria, the only one born before her early widowhood. The seventy-year-old is a former hippie flower child, still devoted to free love (“healthy playful sex” defines him), because sexually anything but disarmed as well as always incurably eccentric. Twenty-five-year-old Vicky, at least she is a professional, a policeman by trade for having wanted to follow the vocation of her father, who was killed young in an ambush. She is free, she would sometimes do without the contribution of that nosy parent, but Iole’s impetuosity, inventiveness and ability to act in her footsteps solve many situations.
The collaboration with two journalists of the afternoon newspaper, La Città – Smilza, black editor and Cagnaccio, director – is increasingly close, complicit in the amateur investigations which for her, a florist by profession, have become essential. They are much more than the hobby of a meddler with a lot of free time, they give her a sense of satisfaction and pride, they strengthen her relationship with the extravagant Iole and in some way they bring her closer to Vittoria, forced more and more often, in last months, to appreciate the successes of “health insurance detective” of the mother.
Yet, Libera is troubled. Gabriele asked her to put aside this new passion for neighborhood crime novels as they left for their first weekend as a couple, after years spent chasing each other and desiring each other. But she knows well in her heart that she cannot please the commissioner (already a very good friend of her husband and then her daughter’s superior, she looks a little), even more so now that Puss in Boots seems to be back in town. She plans to investigate in her own way to finally find out if that uncatchable shop criminal is her father.
He thinks he has discovered the identity of the robber: Diego Capistrano, an old lover of his mother almost half a century earlier, when Iole was having steamy relationships with three other men at the same time. It is the newspapers, La Città in the lead, that evoke him as the characteristic character of the fairy tale, since he carries out robberies dressed in costume, complete with sword, boots with gaiters, mask and plumed hat, paired with the Blue Fairy, magic wand in one hand, gun in the other.
Another reason for upset: she is unable to feel relaxed with Gabriele, to behave in a natural way, the desire to like him or the fear of not liking him is too strong. And then, those secrets and omissions of hers: she was unable to confide to the inspector her ambivalent feelings for Furio, the cook who recently declared himself by offering her a bouquet. Even during the three days on the Island of Elba she had thought about her recent suitor, about how to deal with him when she returned, about how to avoid losing him, even while rejecting her proposal. So much confusion under her red hair, even feelings of guilt, towards the child that the commissioner is expecting from her ex-girlfriend, a young policewoman. That little heart that beats in her ultrasound scans deeply touches a former child raised by her railwayman grandfather Spartaco, with an unknown father and a hippie mother traveling around the world.
Somewhere, in the city, the Blue Fairy is also hunting Diego, whose accomplice and lover she was, preferring to think of herself as “his partner”, in the illusion of joining him in some tropical paradise, to spend a comfortable old age together thanks to the treasure collected with the blows. He is almost seventy years old, but a lifetime ago he was “the gangster’s babe”, when her husband was the most feared bandit in Piazzale Lodi. How could she, at his age, have taken a liking to that traitor Diego?
The City writes that he made another coup, yielding only 50 euros. They also make fun of him, but she knows that the Trifoglio bar in Via Paruta was the tenth target on the list that the gang followed for the hits, before stopping after the ninth, when Isabella’s brother, post and driver, was arrested and Diego had gone into hiding. Nobody knows that they robbed loan sharks, in usury cover shops. The bandit must have taken much more. But if it was Diego, why give up the disguise? And if he had returned to complete the work, why not make himself heard?
There is another investigation, towards which everyone and everyone will converge: Hamma, a small-time Tunisian drug dealer, disappeared after running afoul of the Peruvians. He is Gianni’s thirty-year-old father, a smart boy. Diego is paternally fond of the very young man.
It must be said that in these episodes someone will have to pay attention to certain beautiful floral products… it is no coincidence that at the beginning we were talking about a flower.
