The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston
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Book Reviews of The Monster of Florence
Book Review: Spellbinding read, happy to recommend for readers who have an interest in true crime
Summary: 5 Stars
Just inside the front cover is a timeline, I found it most useful for those, including myself, who may not have an awareness of the events set down on the pages of The Monster of Florence. The timeline helped me keep everything in order as I read the work.
Subsequent to the timeline is a cast of names for those the reader will meet in the book. I like the system. Again, because I had no awareness of the serial murderer who was killing in Florence, Italy the list helped me keep the times, places and people straight. This serial killer, the events, or the people involved is not one I was aware of prior to reading The Monster of Florence.
While the facts surrounding the killings are factual; The Monster of Florence is not so much a sensational recounting of an appalling set of murders as it is a recounting of the men who have spent years investigating, researching, and trying to put the murders into perspective before beginning to write their findings into a book.
Part 1 is The Story of Mario Spezi. In 1981 Spezi, an Italian, was a young member of the press in Florence where he worked for La Nazione. He had held the post for several years. Spezi had no realization how his life might transform when he noticed a fellow reporter approaching his desk one Sunday. It was the journalist who usually handled the crime desk. The man was a phenomenon having worked and survived two decades covering the Mafia.
Spezi was asked to cover the crime desk for his coworker who had a family matter to take care of that day. His parting words would linger often in Spezi's memory: 'nothing ever happens in Florence on a Sunday morning.'
And, Spezi did hang around the paper until just about noon, his co-worker was correct, it was quiet as could be. Then, he determined to go and check out the local police station. While there he learned something indeed had happened. And, from that day onward Spezi's life was never the same. He was continually searching for answers regarding the subject of a most ghastly murder which quickly became murders in short order.
For 165 pages we follow Spezi in his pursuit to determine who The Monster of Florence really is.
Part 2 is The Story of Douglas Preston. Preston, an American writer, had long wanted to compose a murder mystery set in the period of the 1966 Florentine flood when the Arno River overflown its banks following forty days of rain.
Arriving in Florence in 2000 were Preston, his wife and two young children. It was not long before Preston learned that he had come right into to the heart of Monster country. He as Spezi was quickly caught up in a search for the truth. And he and Spezi soon joined forces and their investigation spanned years.
Near Florence, for over a decade the executioner killed and disfigured fourteen people. His killings included both members of seven couples he found in parked cars late at night. He was a serial killer who ritually murdered fourteen young lovers before he stopped. He is known as the Monster of Florence. And, he has never been caught.
The Monster of Florence is a particularly alarming book for the reason that it gives an account of definite horrendous crimes and is not a work of fiction.
Thomas Harris, an American novelist of crime narratives, even studied Florentine Monster data for some of Hannibal Lecter's more outrageous moments in his book featuring Hannibal. Most conspicuously Harris wrote The Silence of the Lambs.
One of the most interesting of elements found on the pages of The Monster of Florence is the twist of irony that has also faced more than one reporter or researcher of true crime; Preston and Spezi themselves became targets of a out of the ordinary police investigation.
The murders, which continue to be unsolved even to today, caught the dismayed notice and thoughts of the Italian people, especially those who lived in and around Florence. The Monster of Florence is a captivating peek into the management and mis management of one of the largest investigations into a series of grisly killings which stunned and concerned the populace of Italy as well as the situation continues to cause worry and shock today.
The Monster of Florence is the explanation of the investigation undertaken by Spezi and Preston for--and identification of--the man Spezi and Preston are persuaded did in fact commit the unspeakable crimes. Included in the book is a recounting of the chilling interview Spezi and Preston conducted with him.
Well written, factual, The Monster of Florence is not a true crime account in the strictest sense because the books centers more the writers and what their research shows than it does on the murders themselves.
Spellbinding read, happy to recommend for readers who have an interest in true crime and how the investigation into it can go awry.
Molly Martin
Reviewer
Book Review: "Inside Of Me, The Night Will Last Forever"
Summary: 5 Stars
In the Sixties and Seventies of the last century, the late Scottish-born novelist Muriel Spark, then living in Rome and Florence, wrote four novels with Italian settings: The Public Image (1968); The Driver's Seat (1970,) in which a deranged young woman actively searches for a man to violently murder her while vacationing in Italy; The Takeover (1976), which accurately predicted the social changes in the world that was to come; and Territorial Rights (1979), set in Venice.
Spark, best known for the far tamer The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), was a moral satirist, and her Italian novels depict greed, envy, betrayal, extortion, blackmail, adultery, rape, robbery, pan-sexual promiscuity, rampant paranoia, prostitution, and violence as routine components of daily life in that country in all tiers of society (to be fair, Spark also identified many of these elements as existing equally in the British Isles in other novels).
Spark eventually settled in the village of Civitella della Chiana outside of Florence, and lived there for several more decades until her death in 2006, so she presumably knew her subject thoroughly.
World-famous Italian film director Dario Argento has, since The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), created nearly a dozen superb 'giallo' thrillers set in his native country, which frequently locate the root of the killer's psychopathology in the twisted forests of Freudian family romance.
Most viewers have probably assumed Argento's wonderfully bizarre and imaginative films to be little more than effective but dramatically-exaggerated horror films. However, novelist Douglas Preston and journalist Mario Spezi's riveting The Monster of Florence (2008) once again proves the adage that truth is stranger than fiction, and in the case at hand, far stranger, far weirder.
The authors crisply and economically weave a complex, decades-long narrative involving not only a violent Florentine serial killer who preys on young lovers fornicating al fresco, but a thriving nocturnal culture of masturbatory voyeurs, a pair of deadly Sardinian brothers, familial hatred, wife killing, routine adultery, incest, homosexual blackmail, bisexual orgies, vacuous conspiracy mongers given free reign and the public's ear, the use of mentally deficient individuals as key witnesses in court, official charges of Satanism and black masses, spiteful government intimidation of the innocent, wrongful imprisonment, and gross police misconduct on the grandest scale imaginable.
The subtext of this extraordinary story seems to be: visit Florence, visit Italy, at your own risk, as the irrational psychology and limited intelligence of the average Italian citizen is almost as dangerous to your wellbeing as that of the country's most aggressive psychopath.
Obsessions with 'saving face,' status, and the Italian concept of 'furbo,' a combination of envy, personal insecurity, profound cynicism, perceptual coarseness, shallow emotions, and suspicion, rule the day. And in the Italy of The Monster of Florence, "idiots" of all stripes and varieties seem to abound at all levels of society, and in all professions, as nowhere else on the planet.
The depiction of the country in Spark's The Takeover is, by comparison, like The Garden of Eden Before The Fall.
As the narrative procedes, both Preston and Spezi are eventually suspected of either being the actual 'Monster of Florence' or working closely with him, not necessarily because officials felt either was guilty or a particularly good candidate, but simply to pay the pair back for essentially mocking them and their absurd, largely groundless conspiracy theories in public.
If the book has a weakness, it is that Spezi's candidate for the actual Monster of Florence, while highly plausible and backed by a fair amount of circumstantial evidence and witness testimony, doesn't seamlessly fit the killer's profile in the air-tight manner readers might prefer.
That profile, which was developed in conjunction with the American FBI, describes the killer as sexually impotent, and no evidence of such a condition is presented or established other than in theory. On the contrary, Spezi's candidate, who is described in physically attractive, masculine terms, comes across in the text, when interviewed face-to-face, as relaxed, confident, and secure in his identity as a male and as a human being.
Additionally, Preston and Spezi's very-late-in-the-game faith that the corrupt, clearly hostile police and carabinieri would respond fairly, favorably, and rationally to the pair's apparent discovery of the killer's lair, where the 'monster' kept the murder weapon and 'trophies' of flesh cut from the victims secreted for decades, seems both implausible and naïve.
Book Review: Chilling, horrific - and true
Summary: 5 Stars
Romantic Florence, a place nearly every visitor to Italy is passionate about. Yet a city blessed with such splendor and steeped in so much culture still has a dark side. "Even at the height of the Renaissance, beauty mingled with blood, civilization with savagery, in this city of paradox and contradiction."
Beginning sometime in 1968 or 1974, depending upon which authority you listen to, a killer --- or killers --- brutally murdered young couples as they made love under the new moon on secluded lovers' lanes around Florence. The murders went on until 1985, gripping Florentines in an unaccustomed terror. The crimes were so horrific that the press dubbed him Il Mostro di Firenze, or The Monster of Florence.
Hundreds of tips flooded the offices of investigators, keeping them very busy chasing down leads. Wives turned in husbands, shopkeepers pointed at rivals, cousins accused each other, and every new arrest gave residents hope. Dozens of suspects were paraded into the interrogation rooms with an impressive number of them tried and convicted, only to be released when the Monster killed again. Far from being discouraged, the police headed off in another direction, as sure of the accuracy of their newest theory as they had been of the previous one.
Over a decade after the last victims were found slaughtered in the hills, American thriller novelist Douglas Preston moved his family to Florence with plans to write a great mystery there. By happenstance --- or maybe divine intervention --- Preston rented a house with a view of one of the scenes of the Monster's double homicides. For a mystery writer, the possibilities this discovery opened up proved simply irresistible, and Preston was soon embroiled in his own investigation of Il Mostro di Firenze.
Italian journalist Mario Spezi had spent years following the cases and had written many articles about them. He hooked up with Preston and led him to the murder sites, opened up his own files to him, and introduced him to people with information. Spezi was elated at finding a new ear and eagerly embarked on a campaign to engender in Preston an enthusiasm equal to his own. It didn't take long for Preston to become irredeemably intoxicated with the story.
What the pair found in their digging pushed them deeper and deeper into the city's most puzzling mystery. They were baffled at how the carabinieri and polizia had conducted the investigation. They were further baffled at how the prosecutor was lured into filing charges against several men despite good alibis. And then still further baffled at the rulings of the magistrates, which seemingly ignored inconvenient evidence.
Finally, Spezi convinced Preston that he had figured out who Il Mostro was. All the evidence he had read and gathered pointed indisputably to one man. That individual was not one of the men who Italian law enforcement had in their sights, and Spezi's journalistic exposition on that point did not make the authorities happy. In fact, it made them unhappy to the point of arresting Spezi for several crimes, even hinting at his involvement in the actual murders. And then their attention turned to Preston. When authorities of a foreign government start to look too closely at your activities, it may be time to reconsider the path you've taken. Preston had to weigh his desire to follow the story with his desire to remain out of prison.
THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE evokes a harsh contrast of gruesome crime scenes with the stunning background of Tuscany. It seems impossible that the bucolic hills could hold sinister secrets of such horrors. Preston and Spezi reveal the reality of living in Italy, with all of its quaint charm and its imperfect legal system. It's not all capos and Mafia that make the headlines there. It's at least one impotent psychopath with a sick desire to prove his power over other human beings. Not only will the Monster's bloody path horrify you, the treatment of these two authors will, too.
--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers
Book Review: The Insanity that can be Italy
Summary: 5 Stars
OK. So the fact that the Italian city states weren't unified into the country we know as Italy until 1861 speaks to a lack of historic organizational structure. And there have been more than sixty government changes at the Prime Minister level since World War II. These elements and more could come into play when examining the chaos that is Italy's judiciary. In Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi's non-fiction account of the "Monster" serial killings around Florence in the 1970s and 1980s, we see that something is horribly, stinking rotten in the core of Italian criminal investigation and prosecution that would take an entire armada of sociologists to understand. To say that fantasy and paranoia drive the actions of even the most senior investigators and judges is to give fantasy and paranoia far too good a name. In a nutshell, why bother going to the heart of the investigation by carefully following evidence that leads to a lone suspect who is a textbook model of a serial killer when you could start a witch hunt that would encompass dozens of people (including a whole village) in a charge of murder as a byproduct of Satanic worship? Without a shred of evidence of course. Why bother taking the most obvious road when you could settle grievances going back decades with spurious charges? Why end the investigation quickly when you could drag it out, garner more publicity, and advance your career?
It is interesting to note that Preston became involved only because he was in Italy doing research for one of his fiction thrillers and just happened to rent a farmhouse next to where one of the murders took place. He started asking questions and was connected with Spezi, a seasoned Italian investigative journalist whose beat was these murders of young couples trysting in the hills around Florence. Spezi's part of the story is told first and he and Preston do a nice job of laying out the basic facts, including the puzzling-then-horrifying actions of the police and judiciary. Spezi's work requires fairly detailed explanations of institutions that don't have true parallels in American society and these were efficiently done. Both he and Preston, who is much better recognized for his fiction, know their craft and all of their skills are on display in this book. I was especially impressed with how much care is taken to ensure that we know the murdered couples and their stories.
Once the story is laid out and we know the extremely large cast of characters (it really helps to have most of their pictures in a section in the middle of the book), the real story of Spezi and Preston can be told and, to other liberty and sanity loving Westerners, it emerges as a nightmare worthy of Orwell. After writing vigorously about the disarray in the investigation, Spezi is arrested as a suspected accomplice to the murders and all of his notes and research are taken, including his work on this book. Luckily for him, he was able to hide a disk that contained much of what we read here. Preston's status as a world-famous writer did not protect him here, either. Since he didn't arrive in Italy until 2000, they couldn't charge him with being directly involved in the murders but they were able to charge him as an accomplice after the fact and ban him from returning to Italy.
This is an absorbing read from beginning to end and a story that really needs to be told. And it is a cautionary tale about running afoul of Italian authorities. The truth may not set you free.
Book Review: Florence as an Italian Backwater
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm not sure what I found more shocking in "The Monster of Florence", the sensational, new book by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi: the brutal murders of a serial killer prowling the Tuscan hills, or a local judiciary that appears to be rife with incompetence and corruption. In fact, it's sometimes hard to separate the fine line between the overreaching ambition of certain judges and police officials (apparently willing to do anything for power), and the dogged, seemingly idiotic, determination with which they pursued any number of disparate lies and half-truths, bogging down an already labyrinthine investigation and resulting in still more deaths, and the ruination of many more lives. You find yourself questioning whether or not these people, in charge of protecting the populace, are actually that heartless and conniving, or can they possibly be that stupid? I suspect it's a little of both, given the number of law enforcement agencies involved, but whatever the case, the most egregious "official" offenders need to be held accountable for their actions.
Because of the outrageous behavior of these authority figures, the atrocities of the Monster of Florence, and the unbelievable chain of events following the crimes, "The Monster of Florence" may sound more like a fictional crime thriller than the terrifying true story that it actually is. Spanning several decades, the book recounts the deaths of a number of young couples viciously murdered in various lovers lane areas in the hills surrounding Florence, the often conflicting efforts of police and journalists as they try and apprehend the killer, and the various aftermaths of their actions. Working for the Italian newspaper, Nazione, reporter Mario Spezi was involved in the case from its beginning, on a boring Sunday morning back in the early seventies. When his co-worker on the crime desk asked him to cover his shift, Spezi hurried to the sight of a double murder and suddenly found himself drawn into an increasingly complex web as more murders and intrigue followed. Aware that the police investigation was seriously flawed, especially as more jurisdictions became involved, Spezi became determined to eventually unmask the killer, despite the efforts of public officials to mislead residents, and deter any theories not aligning with their own. What Spezi obviously didn't count on was the absolute authority with which certain individuals pursued personal goals, which ultimately, did not bode well for the writer.
As luck would have it, bestselling author, Douglas Preston ("Tyrannosaur Canyon", "The Relic", "Dance of Death", "Brimstone") moved his family to Italy and was working on a new novel. During his research on the novel, Preston found himself meeting with Spezi and the whole story of the Monster of Florence unfolded. Intrigued, Preston became involved in Spezi's quest to find the monster, and a whole new chapter opened up, eventually paving the way for this book to be written and published (but not before Spezi was arrested and imprisoned, and Preston interrogated and virtually thrown out of Italy).
"The Monster of Florence" is both exciting and inciting; it's unputdownable and it makes one yearn for true justice to be done in this case.