Continuing their praiseworthy crusade of bringing worthy but so-far ignored European crime fiction to a wider audience, the sweet folk at Bitter Lemon Press give us this first novel – a prize-winning bestseller in Italy -- by a man who knows all about danger: he was an anti-Mafia judge in the seaport of Bari, responsible for many indictments. His fiction debut is a sad and sharply-edged legal thriller, smoothly translated by Patrick Creagh, about a top defense lawyer whose collapsing conscience is saved by taking on the case of an illegal immigrant from Senegal accused of murdering a nine-year-old boy.