The Second Day of the Renaissance [Paperback]

Timothy Williams was selected byThe Observeras one of the “10 Best Modern European Crime Writers” for his series featuring Northern Italian police detective Piero Trotti. Now, 20 years after his last investigation, Trotti returns!

After decades as a police detective in his Northern Italian hometown on the River Po, Commissario Piero Trotti has retired. But retirement brings him no respite. An old friend calls him to Siena to give him urgent news: a notorious hit man has returned to Italy to kill Trotti. The former inspector isn’t surprised to learn of the vendetta against him; Trotti has plenty of skeletons in his closet. His mistaken accusations and failed gambles have cost innocent lives in the course of his investigations. Though Trotti carries the burden of these deaths with him each day, now someone else has appeared to enact his own, long-awaited retribution.

Traveling across Italy to escape his pursuer, Trotti revisits his own past and searches for clues to the cold-case murder of Valerio Gracchi, a leftist radical who became a national media sensation. But even the right answers may not save Trotti and his loved ones.Praise forThe Second Day of the Renaissance

“It's hard to resist Williams as he unfolds his tale in tiny, deliciously wry narrative nuggets—100 titled chapters of puckish literary pointillism.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Like Henning Mankell’s The Troubled Man, this leisurely paced novel is as much about an aging detective pondering his own mortality as it is about solving a crime . . . Williams successfully draws us into Trotti’s mind as he vacillates between despair and defiance.”
—Booklist

“Readers of this cerebral, melancholy tale will hope to see more of the conflicted Trotti, a man heavy with regret, who, when confronted with the possibility oflS