From the best-selling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, a
novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder. A newspap
er committed to blackmail and mud slinging, rather than reporting the news. A pa
ranoid editor, walking through the streets of Milan, reconstructing fifty years
of history against the backdrop of a plot involving the cadaver of Mussolini's d
ouble. The murder of Pope John Paul I, the CIA, red terrorists handled by secret
services, twenty years of bloodshed, and events that seem outlandish until the
BBC proves them true. A fragile love story between two born losers, a failed gho
st writer, and a vulnerable girl, who specializes in celebrity gossip yet cries
over the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh. And then a dead body that sudde
nly appears in a back alley in Milan.