A real-life monster stalks pages of Douglas Preston thriller
A mystery seduces. To solve a puzzle, to know how it all turns out, how the story ends keeps one reading into the night, ignoring the passing hours, the urgent call of sleep, the certain knowledge that tomorrow will be a long, tired, foggy, head-jerking day.
When the mystery happens before your eyes to living, breathing, complicated people who get themselves into all kinds of trouble, figuring out whodunit is all the more alluring — even if you’re a famous author.
Writer Douglas Preston and Italian journalist Mario Spezi set out to solve a mystery, to find a real-life monster, and the effort almost took them down. The result is "The Monster of Florence: A True Story." The book first came out in 2008, published by Grand Central Books, and is now out in paperback with a new afterword — because this story is not done.
The story began long before August 2000, when Preston moved his young family to Florence, in lush, beautiful, ancient Tuscany. Preston is a journalist and mystery writer — you might recognize some of his titles — "The Relic," "Still Life with Crows" or "The Codex" — and since a writer can work almost anywhere, why not work in a city teeming with history, art and architecture.
In the course of research, he met veteran crime reporter Mario Spezi. Writers talk shop. And so Spezi told murder mystery writer Preston one hell of a story — about a real-life murdering monster.
Between 1974 and 1985, Spezi told Preston, someone murdered 14 people — seven couples — as they were making love in vehicles parked in lovers’ lanes in the hills around Florence. The police investigation, as one can imagine, was massive. Almost 100,000 men fell under suspicion and more than a dozen were arrested, only to be set free, in most cases, when the Monster of Florence struck again.
The Monster killed savagely, with sadistic cruelty. The butchery would remind American readers of the "Silence of the Lambs" books, and for good reason — author Thomas Harris sat in on one of the murder trials, Spezi told Preston, and, rumor had it, based Hannibal Lector on the Monster.
Spezi and Preston decided to uncover the truth and unmask the killer. The result is "The Monster of Florence."
A savage crime leaves many victims besides those whose lives are stolen from them so cruelly. The crime breaks the hearts of the people who love them. A community’s sense of safety is destroyed. Rumor, accusation and mistaken arrests ruin other lives. As they investigated the Monster killings, Preston and Spezi found themselves ensnared in the investigation. Authorities accused them of crimes connected with the series of killings; in fact, a prosecutor accused Spezi of being the Monster and arrested him for murder.
"The Monster of Florence" grips the reader’s attention from start to finish. The crimes described are horrific, and so is the damage done to innocents falsely accused. Investigators leave a trail of broken lives, even as the person responsible for the slayings goes free. And yes, Preston and Spezi name the person they think is the killer.
In the afterword, Preston discusses another case wending its way through the Italian justice system, that of Amanda Knox. After a yearlong trial, an Italian jury on Dec. 5 convicted the American college student of killing her roommate. A judge immediately sentenced her to 26 years in prison and her Italian ex-boyfriend to 25 years for the same crime.
Preston raises serious questions about the evidence used to prosecute the Knox case, assembled by much of the same prosecutorial cast of characters who pursued Spezi and him. Knox’s fate eventually will be decoded by an appeals court, but already there are suggestions that her conviction was more about anti-Americanism than about the weight of evidence. Preston was able to develop a number of intriguing leads about people more likely to have murdered Meredith Kercher. So why, he asks, couldn’t the Italian authorities whose job it was to do so.
