DAUGHTER OF ASHES

Hard-used Italian police Supt. Teresa Battaglia, returning to duty following her latest round of traumatic injuries, encounters some old enemies who just won’t let go.

The most obvious of these is Giacomo Mainardi, a serial killer imprisoned for 27 years, who broke out of prison two weeks ago but turned himself in to the police because he feared for his life and thought prison would be safer than the world outside. A more improbable foe with a different approach but no more scruples is wily District Attorney Albert Lona, who doesn’t want Teresa to think bygones are bygones between them just because he rescued her from a fire that could have killed them both. Her most insidious enemy is her dementia, which has gone from creeping to leaping forward in ways that make it impossible to conceal. As Teresa struggles to reopen the 27-year-old case of Mainardi’s murders and his theft of selected bones from each of his victims, dramatized in a series of flashbacks to the days when she was waiting for the results of her superintendent’s exam and hoping that she and the baby she was carrying could survive the violent abuse of her husband, psychiatrist Sebastiano Battaglia, everyone around her, from supportive Inspector Massimo Marini to longtime medical examiner Dr. Antonio Parri, recognizes that she has some uncanny bond with Giacomo Mainardi, who’s done something truly dreadful with the body parts he’s stolen. Linking the superintendent together with the criminal, and both of them with the fourth-century Christian community of Aquileia, is the heaviest lift of Tuti’s ambitious novel.

A monumental tale that broaches just about every mystery you can imagine except for the question of whodunit.