Crimes After Hours

 Alice, a shrewish and nosy typist stays in the office after duty hours to rummage through the personal effects of her hateful colleagues, who've mocked her for years, in search of compromising material to use against them. At the same time and in the very same neighborhood, a serial killer with a split personality is lurking, intent on carrying out his cruel game, entrusting the choice of his next unsuspecting victim to chance. The solitary lives of typist Alice and Cold Hands/Warm Hands are destined to fatally intertwine in the dark and unknown underground of the Prati district of Rome. The investigations into the trail of senseless crimes that Cold Hands leaves behind are entrusted to Riccardo Rosco, a commissioner with a rough character and a disastrous private life.

Read an Excerpt

 Will Alice uncover the secrets she so desperately seeks, or will she become the next pawn in Cold Hands' deadly game? Time is running out, and in the shadows of Rome, no one is safe. Don't miss this pulse-pounding thriller where every choice could be fatal.

 

Cold Hands had woken up with the strange sensation urging him to do what the other, Warm Hands, would never have wanted to do. He had tried with all his might not to heed that impulse; he had shaved, had dabbed the blood that had come out from the small cut he had made with the razor, and had paced up and down the length of his apartment, hoping that the other would have changed his mind and left him alone. But the story was always the same, those mental twists wouldn't leave him.

And now Cold Hands had once again taken control of his gestures and his intentions. It had been a long time since he felt it crawling in his gut. Like a “body snatcher” he took possession of his internal organs, freezing them, until reaching the heart, paralyzing it and, lastly, to his brain, to command him like an automaton.

He had started crying when he realized that Cold Hands was coming back, but then he had given up like every time. He knew that he would not have been able to oppose, he was no longer a free being when Cold Hands manifested itself.

My Review

There is always that one nosy person in the office, but in this book, Alice wasn’t just a nosy parker, she was withdrawn and, in my mind, somewhat mean-spirited.

I had trouble with this story at the beginning. I know why and it may only have been my mood at the time. The bad guy/guys are creepy, and it made the story quite unsettling to me. The kind of “can’t sit down and concentrate” unsettling. I persevered though, and I found a very intriguing story.

I need to attribute all of this “spooky, unsettling” feeling to the author’s writing skills. I think it was the dark streets and tunnels, the rainy murky feeling, and the sneaky, hair-raising thoughts of Cold Hands that set the stage for my mood. Ooh, see what I mean? Cold Hands, yikes.

An enjoyable read from Daniela Alibrandi. Hope to see more.

about Daniela Alibrandi... 

Daniela Alibrandi is the author of successful thrillers and noirs in Italy and abroad. With her sixteen published novels, five English editions and many short stories she is often guest on Italian RAI television and radio broadcasts, she is present in the most important national literary Italian book fairs. Some of her Italian editions are present in Harvard and Yale libraries as well as in New York Public Library. She has won numerous national literary awards, including the Women Arts Week 2022 for her literary career. For years and from various sources, such as literary critics and reviewers, this author’s style has been defined as multidimensional, until it was officialized as MultiDimensionCrime (Acronym MDCrime). A reading experience that forges imagination in a multi-dimensional way. In the complex and intertwined plots of her novels, which lead to sudden and unexpected twists, the characteristics of different strands are harmoniously blended. The reader follows the investigation to solve a murder and at the same time he amazingly enters the mind of the killer, reasoning alongside him, preparing the crime with him, and even partaking in the victims’ despair and terror. All in a growing suspense, both during the narration and in the final pages, when the reader often has to question all the beliefs he has developed during the reading.

On last July 18th, Daniela Alibrandi published her English edition of the book “Crimes After Hours”. And the settings the author chooses are always amazing and palpable. That’s what we find in “Crimes After Hours”, set in the city of Rome and in its underground world, during the late Seventies.

“Crimes After Hours”, in its Italian edition, has won two national literary prizes (Mondadori Contest and Grottammare Noir Competition) and is the first of the MDCrime series Rome’s Multi-Dimensional Crimes, set in Rome’s undergrounds between the late Seventies and the Eighties, whose plots are not connected and can be read independently, all standalone.

 

Author’s English website: https://danielaenglishwebsite.wordpress.com/

Author’s Italian website: https://danielaalibrandi.com/

Facebook Author Page:https://www.facebook.com/p/Daniela-Alibrandi-Autore-100056951476831/

Twitter:https://x.com/danielaalibrand

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielaalibrandi/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danielaalibrandi/

 

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9MG6K5V

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