The Devil and the Dolce Vita

THE DEVIL AND THE DOLCE VITA

Timothy Holme

Commisario Achille Peroni is still feeling that he is nothing more than a museum attendant in the beautiful streets and canals of northern Venice. His southern Neapolitan blood is running cold as the clammy Italian winter looms.  But he is called across the bay to a beach resort area with pretensions of grandeur where a lovely American singer Kehzia Michaelis has disappeared. With one look at her picture Peroni falls in love and he begins the search with a sense of desperation.

Like many young people she lived in a tent on the beach and she sang nightly in a bar called the Dolce Vita.  She was known to sit at times with an older gentleman who always drank the addictive pernod and more recently was seen with a younger man working with orphans and studying for the priesthood.

 

Peroni follows each and every clue assiduously and meets the older gentleman who is a wealthy Venetian  Signore Fabrizio de Sanctis.  Signore de Sanctis says he has not seen  Kehzia for twelve days and that she was just a friend and he can give no further information. But he does invite Peroni to a dinner party at his house and he advises him very strongly to attend because there will be someone there who wants to meet him and will be of great importance to him.

Achille Peroni grew up in the gutters of Napoli and had always had somewhat of a dual personality. One part is the ragged urchin who had to survive the mean streets and the other is the subsequent Dottore of law that is upright and honest and who is the main personality presented to the world. Every so often these two aspects of his ego have conversations with each other in trying to determine which way he should behave in certain situation. His main guiding force has always been Saint Janarius the patron saint of Naples who when appealed to has saved Peroni’s life on more than one occasion.

 

Achille decides to attend this dinner and is drawn into a world of power, decadence and Satanists. The two sides of his personality really have something to argue about now. The powerful want him to call off the search for the girl. Here are the horns of the dilemma for any upright cop. Peroni’s life is at stake once again in more ways than one.

Achille Peroni has come to a crossroads and the way Timothy Holme handles the progress of the case of the missing singer and the “Valentino” of the Italian police is imaginative, entertaining as well as very exciting. We all know the way we want a hero to behave and we understand that our heroes are human so it takes a craftsman to make the outcome convincingly real.


This is the third on this series featuring Achille Peroni. They were written in the eighties. It is a short series written on the 1980's but I did not come across it at that time. There are two more books, THE ASSISI MURDERS and AT THE LAKE OF SUDDEN DEATH. The author Timothy Holme died in 1987.