God's Dog

'To find Marani harnessing the genre of detective story for creative effect is not surprising; after all, he plays with the form in his Europanto synthetic-language sequence Las Adventures des inspector Cabillot and The Last of the Vostyachs revolves similarly around a murderously suppressed linguistic secret. Here, though the terse economy of detective prose works to move events briskly to their violent conclusion. In this Marani is very well served again by Judith Landry's excellent English translation, which captures both the novel's nod to generic conventions of style, and its stranger little flourishes and apercus'. Bharat Tandon in The Times Literary Supplement 'Rome is reimagined as a sinister theocratic state in this brilliantly grim detective novel. 'Barry Forshaw in The Independent' Salazar is a complex, ambivalent character; he is homosexual, with a penchant for hashish, yet at the start of the book he is fiercely committed to the papal cause. He discovers a plot to assassinate the pope, and there's an eye-popping cameo from Joseph Ratzinger's corpse. The good news is that this is the first of a series, and the second has already been written. Heretic that I am, I can't wait'.