- Published: 02/01/2014
- ISBN: 9781783780204
- Granta Books
- 128 pages
Equal Danger
Leonardo Sciascia
Translated by Adrienne Foulke
District Attorney Varga is shot dead while picking a sprig of jasmine. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Is this string of murders an individual vendetta or a more sinister plot? The charming Inspector Rogas is determined to find out. The pursuit of truth and justice are Rogas’s vocation, but his work is frustrated by a system which defies his understanding. He needs a key, a way in, a map, and he is sure that his chief suspect Cres can provide it…
The book, written in 1971, uncannily prefigures the Red Brigade’s subsequent killing of magistrates and the Catholic-Communist pact of the late 1970s in Italy. Developed under Sciascia’s hand in the spirit of a parody, Equal Danger has come to be regarded as a wide-ranging political thriller, one of the masterpieces of the genre.
£8.99
This slender novel exemplifies crime-writing at its most sophisticated and polished
Daily Mail
Only very rarely can we say of such works [crime novels] that they look at questions of social justice with the informed eye of the intelligent artist. We can, however, make that claim for the stories of Leonardo Sciascia
Frank Kermode
The best evocation of the mafia in its birthplace in Sicily