Emily's Book Club

I'm reading books like mad whenever I find myself not working on my new business, working in the studio, working out, or just working at loving life....

"The Monster of Florence" by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi.

Just got through reading the Introduction and the last part really gave me goosebumps. This book is based on real-life facts that occurred in the last couple decades.

Here's the ending of the intro for those whom are prepared to be intrigued:

"Between 1974 and 1985, seven couples-fourteen people in all- were murdered while making love in parked cars in the beautiful hills surrounding Florence, Italy. The case had become the longest and most expensive criminal investigation in Italian history. Close to a hundred thousand men were investigated and more than a dozen arrested, many of whom had to be released when the Monster struck again. Scores of lives were ruined by rumor and false allegations. The generation of Florentines who came of age during the killings say that it changed the city and their lives. There have been suicides, exhumations, alleged poisonings, body parts sent by mail, seances in graveyards, lawsuits, planting of false evidence, and vicious prosecutorial vendettas.

The investigation has been like a malignancy, spreading backward in time and outward in space, metastasizing to different cities and swelling into new investigations, with new judges, police, and prosecutors, more suspects, more arrests, and many more lives ruined.

Despite the longest manhunt in modern Italian history, the Monster of Florence has never been found. When I arrived in Italy in the year 2000 the case was still unsolved, the Monster presumably still on the loose.

Spezi and I became fast friends after that first meeting, and I soon shared his fascination with the case. In the spring of 2001, Spezi and I set out to find the truth and track down the real killer. This book is the story of that search and our eventual meeting with the man we believe may be the Monster of Florence. Along the way, Spezi and I fell into the story. I was accused of being an accessory to murder, planting false evidence, perjury and obstruction of justice, and threatened with arrest if I ever set foot on Italian soil again. Spezi fared worse: he was accused of being the Monster of Florence himself."

They say the Hannibal Lecter movies were based off the case of the Monster of Florence.

It's 12:29 in the morning and I'm already loving this book...

night.