[This book] contribute[s] to broadening the interest in the genre [crime fiction] beyond Italian national borders, by presenting to English readers the Italian manifestation of crime fiction. . . .An informative value can . . . be traced in Barbara Pezzotti's The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: A Bloody Journey. . . .It is time for academic scholasrs to recognize the existence of this rich, broad literary and cultural discourse, developed at the margins or outside university borders, and often on the Web: acknowledging it, and interacting with its interlocutors, seems nowadays a necessity for all those working on contemporary literature.An analysis of the relationship between detective fiction and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country.By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last twenty years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country. Nowadays there is a general acknowledgment of the importance of place in Italian crime novels. However, apart from a limited scholarship on single cities, the genre has never been systematically studied in a way that so comprehensively spans Italian national boundaries. The originality of this volume also lies in the fact that the author have not limited her investigation to a series of cities, but rather she has considered the different forms of (social) landscape in which Italian crime novels are set. Through the analysis of the way in which cities, the urban sprawl, and islands are represented in the serial novels of eleven of the most important contemporary crime writers in Italy of the 1990s, Pezzotti articulates the different waylÓ,