Penguin Modern Classics – Crime & Espionage

Flemming Borck is the ideal bank teller: quiet, meticulous, perhaps a little dull. He even stays late to tidy up, which is how he finds the note: THE THING IN MY POCKET IS A REVOLVER. HAND OVER THE CASH YOU'VE GOT IMMEDIATELY.

This draft of a stick-up, discarded at the counter, is Borck's warning that the Father Christmas outside the shopping centre is not all that he seems. So Borck hatches a plan. But he soon finds out that being quiet and meticulous won't save him from the messy and dangerous situation he's got himself into...

One balmy spring evening on the outskirts of Milan, a Fiat with two passengers plunges into a canal. At first, their deaths are registered as an accident. But the suave Duca Lamberti, a doctor-turned-detective, suspects there’s more to it than that. Because that same canal has been the scene of other deaths, and all the incidents have one man in a lawyer with a murky past stretching all the way back to World War II—a man who, in fact, once shared a prison cell with Lamberti. Winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1968, Traitors to All lays bare the connections between Milan’s troubled history during the war and its swinging sixties affluence, as well as an utterly absorbing tale of betrayal and revenge.