These Dark Things [Paperback]

When a beautiful college student is found murdered in the catacombs beneath a monastery, Captain Natalia Monte of the Carabinieri is assigned to investigate. Could the killer be a professor the student had been sleeping with? A blind monk who loved her? Or perhaps a member of the brutal Napali criminal organization, the Camorra? As Natalia pursues her investigation, the crime families of Naples go to war over garbage-hauling contracts; and all across the city heaps of trash pile up, uncollected. When one of Natalia's childhood friends is caught up in the violence, her loyalties are tested, and each move she makes threatens her own life and the lives of those she loves.

“Where better to set a noir police procedural than in streets awash in uncollected trash, against a backdrop of smoke rising from Vesuvius? . . . Donna Leon owns Venice, and David Hewson rules Rome. With this formidable debut novel, Weiss lays claim to Naples.”
—The Boston Globe

“The most appealing element in this distinctive first is the fascinating contradictions between modern Naples, Italy, and its medieval past that Merete Weiss knits into an original mystery . . . Even Captain Natalia Monte of the Carabinieri and her Buddhist partner are intriguing opposites in their temperaments and their approaches to an investigation.”
—TheCharlotte Observer

“Weiss has done her homework, walked the pestilent streets, prowled the catacombs below the city, and created a thoroughly human woman who will do what she must to protect her part of a city that both enchants and infuriates her.”
—Margaret Maron, author of The Deborah Knott Series

“Naples may be a city of charm and history, but it festers with crime, whether individual or organized. And it forms the backdrop for Jan Merete Weiss' absorbing debut novel . . . Weiss invests her debut with a plot replete with shocks, lS.