THE MEMORY KEY

Fitzgerald presents the fourth installment in a series involving Alec Blume, an American expat (and now Italian citizen) who slowly and methodically tracks down the killer of a young lab assistant and solves the mystery behind a terrorist bombing. 

The novel opens in 1980, when a woman leaves a suitcase full of explosives at a train station in Central Italy, killing everyone within 15 meters of the explosion. While this is obviously an act of political violence, there’s no certainty as to its perpetrator, though some leads point to professor Pitagora, a brilliant man who’s popularized a method of mnemonic memorization but who’s also a fascist—and he flaunts his beliefs proudly. A generation later, two things happen in such close sequence that Blume suspects they’re connected. First, the woman responsible for the train station bombing, Stefania Manfellotto, is hospitalized with brain damage after she’s shot (and after having served 27 years for her earlier crime). The week before she’s shot, she’d had an argument with professor Pitagora, though according to the latter, arguments between the two of them were a regular occurrence. Second, Sofia Fontana, a young woman working as a lab assistant at a health institute, is shot by the same rifle used against Stefania. Although Pitagora proclaims his innocence, his mocking and ironic bantering rubs Blume the wrong way. And, as if working out the intricacies of these murders is not enough, Blume is having trouble on the home front with Caterina, his lover—and fellow police officer. While Blume gets words of wisdom about love and loneliness from his terminally ill mentor, Magistrate Filippo Principe, it turns out Filippo might also be involved in the case Blume is investigating.

Occasionally slow-moving, Fitzgerald’s novel is heavy on both procedure and the convolutions of character.