People like detective stories more and more, perhaps because, as Antonio Manzini reminds us, «what counts in a detective story is what you tell about the criminal event». The genre, in fact, intercepts the moods of our contemporaries, explores the relationship between crime and society, studies characters and reads obsessions, while solving enigmas. And here are some of them, all Italian and from 2026.
Crime, as we know, has the merit of “inventing” a landscape, and there are the Aeolian Islands in three detective stories by Sicilian writers.
Giuseppe Di Piazza in Yellow as Sulfur (HarperCollins) brings his character, the “black” journalist Leo Salinas, on holiday with friends, into the wild and simple atmosphere of a Vulcano in the 1980s. The acquaintance with a young Scotsman, Jamie McLoad, shifts the story to another temporal plane, because in 1902 the entrepreneur Christopher McLoad and Jamie’s great-grandfather sold the island of Vulcano which he owned. A mystery that in the young man’s investigation is tinged yellow like the sulfur of the island.
And after «Giallo Lipari», the Messina journalist Francesco Musolino with Rosso Panarea (Edizioni E/O) moves with Giorgio Garbo to Panarea, where the body of a well-known model, Amodie, is found. The Milanese inspector has to move with deputy inspector Milena Russo in the social world, between influencers and the incel online forum, a dark male galaxy. All between entertainment, fashion shows and sailing regattas.
Instead, Filicudi, with its wild beauty, is the scene of L’isola degli inganni (Mondadori), by Maria Elisa Aloisi. The idea of a short break from the work of the lawyer Ilia Moncada with her friend and partner Irene fades when the body of the very young Gisella is found in the Grotta del Bue Marino, a friend of Carlotta who is the daughter of the professor Rodi Donati in whose villa Ilia and Irene are guests. A story of lies and deception in which Ilia tries to shed light.
Sicily is full of stories, where in Catania, Cristina Cassar Scalia gets Vanina Guarrasi, deputy commissioner of the Mobile squad, moving with a case “camurria” in Le terme dell’Indirizzo (Einaudi). The body of what appears to be a homeless man is found in the imperial baths, a crime which later turns out to be linked to an old and unsolved femicide. Both solved by Vanina, with the help of former commissioner Gino Patanè and his team.
And we go to Trapani, with The crab mentality (Mondadori) and the commissioner of the Mobile Nenè Indelicato, born from the pen of Gaspare Grammatico. And to Nenè, Grammatico lends jokes, melancholy and love for his Trapani while reality with its crimes imposes itself: we must investigate two parallel stories, the death of an orchestra conductor and the disappearance of a young man during a dive.
They are a tribute to the arancini of his teacher and friend Andrea Camilleri. The tramezzini di Rocco Schiavone (Sellerio) by Antonio Manzini, between amarcord and scrapbook, stories of various settings and various humanity (there is even a September Panarea in one of the most melancholy). And in the Trastevere past of the 70s with Rocco as a boy and his friends Furio, Brizio, Sebastiano, a Rome that no longer exists.
Bea Navarra, the graphologist born from the pen of Nunzia Scalzo, after having made her debut with «The rule of nettle» now in The spider in the canvas (Feltrinelli) finds herself faced with a story in which past and present, blood and money, love and revenge are intertwined, starting from a message with an alphanumeric sequence in ancient Greek and hidden behind a painting in the villa of Baroness Giacinta Luce Di Gregorio.
Il tempo dell’orologiaio (Feltrinelli) will become a television series together with the prequel «The clockmaker of Brest», by Maurizio de Giovanni, with the saga of Carlo Malavasi, Andrea Malchiodi and Vera Coen. Ambiguous plots and crimes that take us back to the massacre system of the 80s, and involve secret agents and gray eminences in the shadow of dark powers.
It stages, with black humour, crime as a profession complete with the company of Blonde and The One with the Tie, friends and killer associates, Omicidi Srl (Sellerio) by Alessandro Robecchi, in a ferocious Milan where everything is for sale and no one is innocent. There is a team of women helping Prosecutor Manrico Spinori in Crime in the Frame. A case for Manrico Spinori (Einaudi) by Giancarlo De Cataldo, an investigation into the violent death of Verena Rex, an artist expert in scarification, which brings the “Continino” melomaniac into the Roman world of contemporary art among eccentric characters, mysteries and lies.
And it is the inspectors Daniel Corvo and Viola Zardi in The Crow’s Nest (Feltrinelli) by Piergiorgio Pulixi who investigate the macabre crimes of a murderer in the Sinis Peninsula who as an “artist of death” always leaves the trace of a human artefact. A hunt that faces the human abyss with a wild Sardinia in the background.
Marco Malvaldi and Samantha Bruzzone sign La scala di seta (Sellerio) with their character, Serena Martini, chemist and sommelier, as well as mother, who investigates together with Corinna Stelea, police superintendent, the suspicious death of Chiara Sbrana, hit on a pedestrian crossing by a hit-and-run driver.
It moves around an enigma Four alleged family members (Sellerio) by Daniele Mencarelli, with poor human remains found in a forest in the province of Latina and the carabinieri, Captain Damasi and Circosta, who with their investigation reawaken impulses of violence, legacies of a black world that still expresses nostalgia for what was Littoria.