#BlogTour-‘Flowers Over The Inferno’ by Ilaria Tuti

Today is my turn on the Orion Books tour for ‘Flowers Over The Inferno’ by Ilaria Tuti,translated by Ekin Olap, available now in hardback and ebook formats.

My thanks to the publishers, author and Tracy Fenton for the #blogtour invite !

About the book….

AN IDYLLIC VILLAGE IN THE ALPS. 

A LEGACY OF SIN. 

AN EVIL LURKING IN THE WOODS.

In a quiet village surrounded by the imposing Italian Alps, a series of violent assaults take place.

Police inspector Teresa Battaglia is called in when the first body is found. Soon more victims are discovered – all horrifically mutilated – and when a new-born baby is kidnapped, Teresa’s investigation becomes a race against the clock.

But Teresa is also fighting a battle against her own body, weighed down by age and diabetes, and her mind, once invincible and now slowly gnawing away at her memory…

Wow! What a book!

The story is compelling, the setting even more so and I can completely see how people have compared Teresa Battaglia to Ann Cleeve’s Vera Stanhope– both irascible women in their 60’s who bow to no man.

Teresa’s subordinate, Massimo Marini makes a fabulous first impression at the primary murder scene-he introduces himself to the male police officer never once assuming his new boss could be a woman!

The murder scene drips in icy intensity and eerieness, a feeling that only increases as the book progresses. The first victim is found, face down, naked and surrounded by small boobytraps to preserve the scene for maximum impact. Further away , at the edge of the Traveni woods but in view of the corpse is an effigy dressed in the dead man’s clothes.

But where are the victims eyes?

More bodies begin to pile up, as the story switches between now, and the mysterious ‘School’ in the late 1970’s Austria, just on the other side of the Alps ,where sinister experiments are conducted in the ward known as ‘The Hive’.

40 subjects are being observed in The Hive, by nuns who ‘Observe, record, forget’ whatever it is that they do in the room where the subjects live-they are all unexceptinal except for subject 39 who is not responding to the experiment as he should. How the two storylines dovetail is an intriguing and pleasing process to follow.

Gory, mysterious, tense and genuinely chilling,’Flowers Over The Volcano’ is at once both novel of suspense and loveletter to the author’s homeland and the power of women who will not be intimidated.

I look forward to reading more of Teresa Battaglia’s cases through the rest of the trilogy!

About the author….

ILARIA TUTI lives in Friuli, in the far north-eastern part of Italy. FLOWERS OVER THE INFERNO, her debut novel and the first book in the Teresa Battaglia trilogy, was a top 10 bestseller on publication and the biggest debut of 2018 in Italy. Rights for the novel have been sold in over 15 countries, making her one of the most internationally successful Italian authors of recent years.

Twitter @Ilaria_Tuti