Author: Nunzia Scalzo
Publisher: Feltrinelli
Release Date: 01-07-2025
Catania, 1965. Young Norma Speranza is rushed to the hospital by her husband and the doorman in serious condition and dies shortly after. She shot herself in the living room with a rifle, or at least that’s what the investigation concludes, although there are many doubts about how she did it and why. A note found next to her body seems to confirm the suicide theory: “Everything is destroyed and I am killing myself.” But the family is convinced that it was murder and that the note was planted to provide an alibi for the killer.
Sixty years later, Norma’s granddaughter commissions Bea Navarra, an intuitive, stubborn, and unconventional forensic graphologist, to analyze the note once again. Was it suicide or murder?
Through the direct accounts of the individuals involved in the cold case—including the couple’s relatives, the building’s doormen, their friend Evelina, and her husband Andrea—and thanks to the investigation by Bea and her friend, journalist Domenico Grimaldi, the dynamics of the death are reconstructed piece by piece.
Nunzia Scalzo, a forensic graphologist like her protagonist, leads the reader on a journey of discovery into a profession that deciphers writing and, at the same time, probes the secrets that we unwittingly reveal about ourselves. Secrets that Bea Navarra would call motives.
A thriller in which every voice hides a scandal – domestic, sexual, criminal – adds clues and misleads, offering its own view of the world, where the world is the ‘Catania bene’ of the 1960s.