L'OROLOGIAIO DI BREST

A journalist and a history professor the daughter of a man who died forty years ago and the unwitting son of the presumed killer reopen a case that was buried for decades. As they retrace their fathers' hidden past, a ghost resurfaces: a watchmaker, an expert in weapons and explosives who vanished into thin air and now guards truths too dangerous to reveal.
Told across two different timelines, L'orologiaio di Brest follows a compelling cast of characters. It is a gripping and propulsive thriller filled with revelations and unexpected twists.
Its surprising finale sets the stage for what comes next.

Vera Coen is a journalist driven by one obsession: the truth. But at forty, with a shaky career and growing doubts about her past choices, she stumbles on a discovery that could change everything.
Professor Andrea Malchiodi, now in his fifties, is still reeling from the scandal that derailed his academic career and from a marriage hollowed out by years of indifference. He's also coping with the slow decline of his mother Flavia, who raised him alone after a brief encounter during the early 1970s.

One day, Vera knocks on Andrea's door with a revelation that shatters his already fragile world: she believes that Andrea's father, a man he has never known, was responsible for her own father's death in a politically motivated attack forty years earlier.

Together, Vera and Andrea begin to investigate. What they find is a trail leading deep into the darkest chapter of Italy's recent past, and into the life of a vanished figure: the watchmaker, a brilliant expert in explosives and timing devices, a fugitive, a keeper of dangerous truths. A man whose story intertwines with theirs in ways they could never have imagined.

Maurizio de Giovanni is one of the major bestselling Italian authors. He is the author of standalone novels and of four series: the historical crime series starring Commissario Ricciardi (Einaudi Stile Libero) the police procedural novels about the "Bastards of Pizzofalcone" (Einaudi Stile Libero), the noir cycle about Sara Morozzi, former agent of the Italian secret services (Rizzoli), now a hit Netflix show, and the series devoted to Mina Settembre, a social worker investigating in Quartieri Spagnoli in Naples (Sellerio/Einaudi Stile Libero).