Poisonville

“[An] outstanding fable of greed, corruption and moral abandonment. Filled with echoes of Dante’s Inferno.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Poisonville is noir par excellence—there’s murder, moral ambiguity, and a less than heroic main character. In this bestselling novel, however, the real killer is not an individual but an entire system.

The heavily industrialized northeast, Italy’s richest region, is undergoing dramatic change. It once drove the nation’s economic boom—a regional superpower, affluent and arrogant, a land that abided only its own rules. But then the factory owners began moving their operations across the border to former Soviet countries where labor was cheap and regulatory bodies all but absent. With the factories closed and the jobs gone, new elements insinuated themselves into the old system, and the Brahmin families of the northeast began employing increasingly violent methods to protect their wealth. Once renowned for its economic might, the region is now known for trafficking every imaginable commodity, media personalities and politicians on the payrolls of oligarchs and mobsters, and its ongoing environmental catastrophe.

Welcome to Poisonville! Here, the young lawyer Francesco, heir to the region’s second richest family, will have to decide between business as usual or a violent rupture with the ways of the past. The wrong choice could cost him his life.

“Corruption, Cynicism. Illegality. Collusion. The world of business described by Massimo Carlotto in Poisonville is frightening as hell.” —La Repubblica

“A black fable that exposes that dark side of the wealth that has been generated over the last few decades.” —Il Mattino