In The Name Of Ishmael Book

A stunning literary thriller of international political intrigue, In the Name of Ishmael features two interlocking stories that weave a gripping conspiracy plot with a serial killer narrative culminating in a shattering climax that delivers an astonishing surprise.

Milan, 1962. David Montorsi, an earnest young police detective, is obsessed by a death that his colleagues conspicuously ignore: a child found murdered and half-buried under a World War II monument in a soccer stadium. Montorsi's investigation leads him into a world of secret assassinations and danger engineered, it seems, by the elusive figure named Ishmael.

Milan, 2001. Another detective, Guido Lopez jaded almost past caring investigates the random killing of a stranger on the street. Against his will he is ensnared in a plot that leads him deep into Europe's political underworld where bizarre and ritualistic acts of sex and murder orchestrated by Ishmael ultimately threaten the security of the West.

In their parallel quests to uncover the identity of Ishmael, Montorsi and Lopez struggle to assemble pieces of the puzzle that connect to a series of inexplicable events, from the killing of an Italian press magnate to a sadomasochistic secret society. Both are led ever closer to the seemingly omnipotent yet invisible Ishmael who may not only direct the deaths of innocents but determine the fates of nations.

Set in a Milan shadowed by rain, cold, and menace, as well as in Paris, Frankfurt, and Brussels, and spanning not just generations but a Europe and an America in profound conflict, In the Name of Ishamel is both an extraordinarily original thriller and a bold exploration of the hidden uses of power.

About the Author

Giuseppe Genna was born in Milan in 1969. He has worked in Italian television and was the editor-in-chief of Poesia, a literary journal. In the Name of Ishmael is his first U.S. publication.

The New Yorker

This baroque thriller, set in a Milan where mist seems to continually pour from the ground, opens with two apparently unconnected events: the discovery of a murdered child, buried under a war memorial, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962; and, almost four decades later, the shooting of a man in the street on the eve of an international political conference. Chapters shift between the two detectives pursuing the investigations. The tortuous plot -- involving sadomasochistic clubs, fringe sects, and assassins -- hinges on the historical figure of Enrico Mattei, an Italian industrialist who died in a plane crash in 1962 under suspicious circumstances. The author, a poet and journalist, writes with jittery, propulsive energy, and he can stop the reader cold with a single image, as when he describes, at the crash site of Mattei's plane, the unbroken, blood-stained trees.