Claudio Scarpino was born in the district of Centocelle in Rome in 1956. He graduated from the scientific high school. He began working in the field of computer science by interrupting his engineering studies. In 1984 he won a competition as a programmer at the National Research Council, where he still works today. Due to an injury, having to stay home for several months, in 1996 he began writing short stories about his youth and then comedies, but never published. Then in 2017 he dedicated himself to his great passion by starting to write a detective novel centered on the friendship between a policeman and a shoemaker. He managed to publish it in 2020 directly through the self-publishing platform Youcanprint and then, thinking of making a series, he also wrote the second. The series is called I Racconti del Calzolaio, always centered on these two characters, the shoemaker Pietro Russo, and his policeman friend Antonio Cosentino who, after a strange robbery in a goldsmith’s shop in the Prati district, manage to understand what revolves around the family of goldsmiths.
All the protagonists of the book have something to do with the author’s private life as well as the places and people he met.
Despite the fundamental help of agent Valentina Rinaldi this time no one will discover the killer.
Claudio Scarpino has decided to offer readers new characters, simple and direct.
The novel manages to have a perfect plot for its protagonists. Through careful investigation, that enigma, so far from the habits of a small neighborhood, that it is almost underestimated by the police force itself.
It is a detective story with a typical structure, where the crime, the investigative investigation, are able to perfectly answer those questions, such as the motive and the alibi, which are the object of analysis by the reader himself.
It is a novel that captures the attention and is capable of involving in reasoning and deductions even those readers who are not too attached to the typical detective book.
A simple language, never burdened, guides the reading in the investigation itself, thanks to the immense, shrewd and precise work of the author.
The narrative techniques chosen by the writer, such as the suspense, the twist and the surprise ending, make this novel enjoyable and intriguing.
As in all detective and thriller books, the dialogues are very important: they allow, in fact, to collect all those elements, which make the path towards the solution of the mystery easy. And it is thanks to the conversations that it is possible to get to know the various characters of this novel, and to enter a distant and different environment, compared to Italy itself.
The plot is captivating, interesting for the depth of the reflections it stimulates in the reader and, in carefully chosen points, jumps of tension that increase the pace and make the pleasure of the story soar and curiosity finds satisfaction.
Scarpino’s thriller is so natural and casual that it has the flavor of bringing to life, to all mystery fans, a mystery in which one could casually come across in real life, while remaining safe from the traps of crime, comfortably on the sofa. .
It is a delicate and strong, poignant and upsetting novel.
So much to live and meditate, in a dynamic reading that fascinates.
Evil has the thrusts of banality and sometimes justice cannot be revealed; where the hand that punishes has assumed a right that is not its own; where a truly surprise ending after the truth promises us exciting new developments.