“The murder of a jockey casts a pall over a lavish party and triggers some thoughtful sleuthing. A macabre Mediterranean mystery bubbling with romantic intrigue.” -----Kirkus Reviews
Avvocato Lorenzo Maggioni, a Milanese attorney, and his wife, Valeria, both look forward excitedly to Siena’s spectacular Palio, a festival with a horse race as centerpiece—Valeria describes it as an orgasm following a 365-day erection—followed by alcohol-fueled parties. Valeria is enraptured by the suave Count Guidobaldo; Enzo has eyes for the alluring blond American Ginevra. Readers may share Valeria’s assessment of an event that runs on flirtation, dalliance, and tidbits of local color until the death of Puddu, “the king of the Palio jockeys,” is discovered halfway through. Rakish Dr. Lippi arrives shortly after on a motorbike to question everyone. Most observers assume that Puddu died by suicide, but the analytical Enzo isn’t so sure. Now that the tantalizing revelry has soured, Valeria wants to leave, but her husband doesn’t. And of course, leaving isn’t an option until the mystery is solved. Now that the sensual pleasure he expected is off the table, Enzo begins to investigate, beginning with Puddu’s tearful girlfriend, Elisabetta. The comedy of licentious manners, going hand in hand with Enzo’s probe and the authors’ rich description of the Palio and the equestrian world, all add up to a colorfully offbeat mystery. Fruttero and Lucentini’s sophisticated drollery and Italian sensibility will particularly delight fans of the prolific Andrea Camilleri, whose final Inspector Montalbano novel was published in 2021.---Kirkus Reviews
Fruttero & Lucentini stylishly spin out their tale. It's an unusual piece of mystery-fiction but deftly presented -- in all its curious details (and the complexity of the strange Palio).---Complete Review
“One of the pleasures of reading Italian crime novels is the ‘extras’ that their authors frequently drop into the text: little anecdotes about a person or place or time, which are sometimes almost irrelevant to the story, but which grip the reader’s imagination because of their eccentricity, unexpectedness or vivid colour. And then, there’s the philosophising, the discursive analysis of a situation or someone’s behaviour, which we might assume would hold up or confuse the action but which in fact illuminates it and gives it context. It becomes an essential part of the evidence trail. This is very much the case with Fruttero and Lucentini: Runaway Horses is their second collaboration to be published by the excellent Bitter Lemon Press in another splendid translation from Gregory Dowling. Like its predecessor – The Lover of No Fixed Abode – Runaway Horses takes place over just a few days around an Italian city: in this case Siena, in the prelude to that almost mystical, certainly ancient but still very contemporary event, the Palio, the horse-race run round the famous piazza del Campo. But, unlike in their previous book, there is this time a dead body and some serious Machiavellian duplicity for the protagonists to contend with. They are a Milanese lawyer, Enzo Maggione, and his wife Valeria. He deals with events as they are, pragmatically, cynically; she cannot take life as it comes but broods on what confronts and affects her. As the visit to Siena begins to threaten the commonplace orderliness of their marriage, Maggione reflects that his wife can’t accept the idea of destiny or chance: Like all women … she needs to trace the chain of events … to discover the one she feels is crucial … even if nothing can be done about it now. Valeria, however, senses a real crisis: … countless gestures she has had to repress … caresses, endearments, outpourings … kept locked up inside her and now stab her like rheumatic pains. But Enzo … doesn’t want to hear the word ‘crisis’ … rejects the definition, considering it unseemly tomfoolery … that’s why he has started to find everything false and unreal. And into this marital quagmire steps destiny and hands them an unforeseen and unwelcome dilemma …
The couple were on their way to spend a few days with friends, who live outside Siena, and then to go and watch the horse race. But they take a wrong turning in a violent, blinding hailstorm and find themselves in the wrong house. The owner offers them refuge from the storm until they can move on to their friends’ place; however, they soon realise they’re in somewhere special: a palazzo and the owner is the head of one of the contrade – city wards – competing for the race’s prize: the silk banner or palio. The Maggiones decide to leave as soon as is decently possible, but the phone lines are down and, as events unfold, they find themselves lured by being ‘on the inside’, in on the planning for the Palio. As their host Guidobaldo remarks, the race lasts hardly 100 seconds but those 100 seconds are like an orgasm: If you forget this, you understand nothing about the Palio. The climax is lightning swift, but the tension has been building up, swelling, for the whole year. And so the couple are drawn almost as by an invisible hand into the feuding, plotting, bribery and worse that surround and indeed underpin the contest. Pride, prestige, influence, rivalry are its psychological and spiritual underbelly and they force Enzo and Valeria to test the very foundations of their marriage. In The Lover of no Fixed Abode Venice is a main ‘player’ in the story; here, Siena is both the backdrop and main act, but it’s less the city than its people who are the focus, how they plot and counter-plot: a study in human character and interaction, brilliant in both its detail and wry humour. Friendships are formed, grow, blossom then suddenly end as necessity or contrada loyalties dictate. Everything is predicated on the demands of the Palio, to behave otherwise is to court anything from emotional hostility to physical danger. Someone may kill to clinch the palio – or to stop someone else from doing so: A shriek. A desperate howl of death. A scream of agony, there, in the middle of the night. Once again, Fruttero and Lucentini have taken a seemingly innocuous place and event and delved deep into its secrets to produce a compelling story, told with sharpness of insight and in sparkling language.” ----ELN European Literature Network Reviewed by Max Easterman
