Review Tour & Giveaway: Crimes After Hours by Daniela Alibrandi

CRIME AFTER HOURS

by

Daniela Alibrandi

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Noir / MultidimensionCrime / Thriller

Publication Date: July 16, 2024

Page count: 267 pages

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SYNOPSIS:

Alice, a shrewish and nosy typist stays in the office after duty hours to rummage through the personal effects of her hateful colleagues, who've mocked her for years, in search of compromising material to use against them. At the same time and in the very same neighborhood, a serial killer with a split personality is lurking, intent on carrying out his cruel game, entrusting the choice of his next unsuspecting victim to chance. The solitary lives of typist Alice and Cold Hands/Warm Hands are destined to fatally intertwine in the dark and unknown underground of the Prati district of Rome. The investigations into the trail of senseless crimes that Cold Hands leaves behind are entrusted to Riccardo Rosco, a commissioner with a rough character and a disastrous private life.

 

Will Alice uncover the secrets she so desperately seeks, or will she become the next pawn in Cold Hands' deadly game? Time is running out, and in the shadows of Rome, no one is safe. Don't miss this pulse-pounding thriller where every choice could be fatal.

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ENJOY AN EXCERPT:

Often, she had thought about it, every time she had seen her colleagues leaving one by one, each caught up in the vortex of their own lives from which they already seemed to be sucked in. She watched them while some left slowly, some more hurriedly, all putting on their coats and hats and disappearing beyond the entrance door, at the end of the smoky hallway. Remaining in the office after working time, that was the thought lingering in her mind for a while. That would be the right moment when she could start her own personal investigation, uncovering what their lives might be hiding. 

Everyone had managed to establish sentimental relationships, some stable and others fleeting, and each one had something that drew outside of those gray and anonymous walls. Not her, though; she had long been labeled as antisocial, bitter, single, introverted, irritable, and difficult, despite her age not yet surpassing thirty-five years.

 

And now finally she was alone, walking down the hallway where office doors opened, moistening her thin lips with the tongue, like someone about to eat a tasty meal, free to delve into the lives of others.

 

The door had creaked slightly. The warm light from the lamp left on the desk greeted her like the torch of a cinema mask, giving her the same urge to uncover a new story, a vulnerable world that revealed itself in all its fragility. The time and tranquility allowed her to settle into the comfortable dark leather swivel armchair, much more comfortable than the rigid chair where she was forced to sit for hours at the typewriter.

 

She played with it for a few minutes, twirling it around, enjoying the effect of being able to gain a different height, higher if it spun to the right, lower if to the left. Then she started caressing the edge of the desk, as if to test the reality that the coward touched every day, until she decided to squat down and start rummaging through his drawers, starting with those that didn't seem to be locked.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Daniela Alibrandi is the author of successful thrillers and noirs in Italy and abroad. With her sixteen published novels, five English editions and many short stories she is often guest on Italian RAI television and radio broadcasts, she is present in the most important national literary Italian book fairs. Some of her Italian editions are present in Harvard and Yale libraries as well as in New York Public Library. She has won numerous national literary awards, including the Women Arts Week 2022 for her literary career. For years and from various sources, such as literary critics and reviewers, this author’s style has been defined as multidimensional, until it was officialized as MultiDimensionCrime (Acronym MDCrime). A reading experience that forges imagination in a multi-dimensional way. In the complex and intertwined plots of her novels, which lead to sudden and unexpected twists, the characteristics of different strands are harmoniously blended. The reader follows the investigation to solve a murder and at the same time he amazingly enters the mind of the killer, reasoning alongside him, preparing the crime with him, and even partaking in the victims’ despair and terror. All in a growing suspense, both during the narration and in the final pages, when the reader often has to question all the beliefs he has developed during the reading.

On last July 18th, Daniela Alibrandi published her English edition of the book Crimes After Hours. And the settings the author chooses are always amazing and palpable. That’s what we find in Crimes After Hours, set in the city of Rome and in its underground world, during the late Seventies.

Crimes After Hours, in its Italian edition, has won two national literary prizes (Mondadori Contest and Grottammare Noir Competition) and is the first of the MDCrime series Rome’s Multi-Dimensional Crimes, set in Rome’s undergrounds between the late Seventies and the Eighties, whose plots are not connected and can be read independently, all standalone.

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REVIEW:

4 stars!

A MultiDimensional crime tale of menace and murder! 

Crimes After Hours is a new-to-the-U.S. tale of murder and madness by renowned Italian mystery writer Daniela Alibrandi. Suspense rises from every page, and menace oozes from each encounter with the hiding-in-plain-sight murderer, creating a tense story that readers will be loathe to put down for even a minute. 

The author weaves her story, which is a genre-crossing blend of murder mystery, police procedural, noir, and thriller, around the points of view of a number of characters, including that of the killer, whose frightening intensity was downright chilling. There are also main characters, such as Alice Pendia, the nosy typist mentioned in the book’s synopsis, and Commissioner Riccardo Rosco, the lead detective, who are somewhat difficult to like, at least initially. 

The plot is intriguing, and there is more than one mystery to work out. While one resolution is straightforward, another comes as quite a surprise. In true noir fashion, Rosco succumbs to some femme fatale temptation, resulting in a very sexy adult situation that doesn’t bode well for his career. 

The author sets her story in Rome, where the busy streets, the Tiber River, and small eateries and pizzerias provide charming backdrops to many of the scenes. However, it was the tunnels underneath the city that connect whole neighborhoods of office and apartment buildings that really made an interesting and sinister impression on me. The action occurred in the not-too-distant past (the late 70s-early 80s), prior to much of the technological advantages we now take for granted. Getting to work on an electric typewriter was an office coup, and the ubiquitous carbon paper was as much a mess in the story as I remember it being in reality. Landlines are the norm with cell phones, let alone smartphones, yet a thing of the future. 

The novel was written and published originally in Italian, so this edition is an English translation. I had some difficulty falling into the cadence of the narrative at first but eventually adjusted as the story progressed. At times, the translation doesn’t quite work, and this would disrupt the flow of the story until the true meaning became apparent. This version would benefit from another pass by a native English speaker. 

I recommend CRIMES AFTER HOURS to readers who enjoy traditional mysteries, police procedurals, noir thrillers, and suspense.

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