Only In Naples (Non-Fiction) by Katherine Wilson

Hardback:  'See Naples and die,' said Goethe.  But Katherine Wilson saw Naples and started to live.

Katherine is fresh out of college when she arrives in naples to intern at the US Consulate.  There, she meets handsome, studious Salvatore, and finds herself enveloped by his family - in particular by his elegant, accomplished mother, Raffaella.  And it is here that Katherine's real education begins.

Immersed in Neapolitan culture, tradition and cooking, slowly and unexpectedly falling for Salvatore, and basking in Raffaella's company and guidance, Katherine discovers how to prepare meals that sing, from rich ragù to pasta al forno with bacon, béchamel and four kinds of cheese.  Through courtship, culture clashes, Sunday Mass, marriage and motherhood, Katherine slowly comes to appreciate carnale, the quintessentially Neapolitan sense of comfort and confidence in one's own skin.

Steeped in sunlight, wine and unforgettable food, Only in Naples (2016) is a love letter to a city, of lessons in food and famiglia, a coming-of-age story and a transporting account of learning to live the Italian way.

About the author:  Katherine Wilson was born and raised in Washington, DC and graduated from Princeton University.  She has lived in Italy for the past nineteen years, working in television, film and theatre.  Most recently, she acted in Giuseppe Tornatore's The Best Offer with Geoffrey Rush and Donald Sutherland.  She lives in Rome with her husband and two children.

Wild Man (True Story) by Alecia Simmonds

Paperback:  Wild Man (2015) is a work of narrative non-fiction.  It is a story of one man's tragic death that raises questions around love, madness, law, violence and masculinity.  The story is an intellectual journey.  It is a neo-journalism from the gates of hell, a study in modern Australia gothic, madness and horror.

In April 2012, a man was shot dead by police on a remote farm in New South Wales called the School of Happiness.  The victim, who was high on a cocktail of drugs and who suffered from mental illness, had been threatening attendees of a hippie festival with a crossbow and hunting knife.  When the police finally arrived, they tried to subdue him but, ultimately, fatal shots were fired.

In Wild Man, Alecia Simmonds follows the coronial inquest into the police killing.  She reveals what really happened that night and unravels the web of issues entangled in this fascinating, bizarre and, undoubtedly, tragic case:  a cultural clash between hippies and hunters;  drug use, violence, masculinity and psychosis.  She asks how family members, as well as police, came to work on the frontline of mental health.

This spectacular book is a clear-eyed at some of the most pressing problems facing contemporary Australia.

"With a lawyer's precision, an historian's sensibility and a storyteller's heart, Alecia Simmonds has written an important and necessary book.  In Simmonds, we have a new observer of the way our society functions." - Maggie Mackellar

About the author:  Alecia Simmonds is a regular writer for Fairfax Media’s Daily Life and a postdoctoral fellow in law at the University of Technology, Sydney.  Her columns have been published in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Arena, Womankind, and The Guardian.  Wild Man is her first book.

I'm Always Right

John O'Donohue (1956-2008), Irish Poet, Author, Priest and Hegelian Philosopher

Mother Teresa, Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End (The Story of a Crime Series) by Leif G W Persson

Paperback:  Between Summer's Longing an Winter's End (2010)  is the first novel in a trilogy that has become the defining account of the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme - an event that still haunts the collective Swedish memory.  It is acclaimed as one of the greatest Swedish crime novels of all time and is an award-winning Swedish classic.

Stockholm.  The dead of winter.  The temperature is already well below freezing.

A young American dies, falling from a tall building.  It appears to be a casual, self-inflicted death.  It should be an open-and-shut case.  But when Superintendent Lars Martin Johansson begins to delve beneath the layers of corruption, incompetence and violence that threaten to strangle the Stockholm police department, he uncovers a complex web of treachery, politics and espionage.

Johansson quickly realizes that there is nothing routine about this suicide as it soon takes him from domestic drama to the rotten heart of Sweden's government and the murder of the prime minister.

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is a riveting insider's combination of black satire, thriller, psychological drama, and police procedural about the biggest police investigation in recorded history.

The book is translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlen.

About the author:  Leif G W Persson is the Grand Master of Scandinavian crime fiction.  Over three decades, he has taken a scalpel to the political and social mores of Swedish society in his dark, complex and satirical crime novels.  His work melds the social realism of a Balzac or a Dickens with the hard-boiled street smarts of James Ellroy.

Born in 1945, Persson has had an extraordinary career.  At once Scandinavia's most renowned criminologist and leading psychological profiler, Persson has also served as an advisor to the Swedish Ministry of Justice.  Since 1991, he has been Professor at the National Swedish Police Board and is regularly consulted by media as the country's foremost expert on crime.  He is the author of nine novels.  Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is the first to be translated into English.  His most recent novel, The Dying Detective (2016), was awarded Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers.

Rating:  3/5

Naturally

Autumn

Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683), Puritan Divine

Nightmare In The Sun (True Crime) by Danny Collins

Hardback:  "They'd been talking about and planning a move for ages.  They had their hearts set on a nice villa, away from the hustle and bustle of the tourist resorts." - Bernard O'Malley on his brother's dream.

"Two bedroom house in 4000 metre square plot.  Pine trees, water, electricity.  No agencies.  30 000 euros." - The advert in the Costa Blanca News which ensnared the O'Malleys.

"The rumours were awful and very hurtful to the family.  We knew something dreadful must have happened." - Jenny, daughter of the O'Malleys, on early speculation that her parents had faked their disappearance.

"If we hadn't been led to the spot, we would never have found them." - Police Chief Jose Abellan on the confession by one of the suspects that led to the discovery of the bodies.

"There is no blueprint for what you do and how you do it.  You have your own life to lead, but you live with it constantly - every hour of the day it's there." - Bernard O'Malley.

In September 2002, house hunters Anthony and Linda O'Malley from Llangollen, North Wales, arrived in Benidorm on Spain's Costa Blanca to bid for a house at auction that they had earmarked for their retirement.  Within a week of their arrival, the couple vanished.

Welsh detectives, alerted by large sums of cash withdrawn from the couple's UK bank accounts, launched their own missing persons inquiry.  Daughter Nicola Welch, frantic with worry but with no idea of what really happened, made an appeal on Crimewatch for her parents to get in touch.

Six months after the disappearance, following emailed ransom demands from a mysterious figure codenamed Phoenix, Spanish police recovered the bodies of the couple from under the cellar floor of a villa in Alcoy, 40 kilometres inland.  The full horrifying story was pieced together in a painstaking investigation.

The O'Malleys had been tricked into viewing the property, held captive for five days and forced to hand over the money they had saved for their deposit.  When they were no longer of use, they were callously disposed of in the cellar of the very house they had hoped would be their dream home.

In April 2006, two men from Venezuela were found guilty by a Spanish court of kidnap, robbery, torture and murder.  Jorge Real Sierra was jailed for 62 years and Jose Antonio Velazquez Gonzales for 54 years.

Investigative journalist Danny Collins helped North Wales officers track down the killers in a tense search that saw his life threatened and took him into the rough and tumble of a Benidorm underworld never seen by tourists.  His story, Nightmare in the Sun (2007),  is a cautionary tale for all who seen an escape to the Mediterranean sun.

About the author:  Danny Collins is a freelance investigative journalist working crime-ridden southern and eastern Spain from Gibraltar to Valencia.  The disappearance of the O'Malleys was one of the last cases he covered before taking semi-retirement in 2004 as news editor of the CBN News Group to become its senior correspondent.  He is a regular broadcaster and accomplished cartoonist and writes a regular weekly column on British affairs that is syndicated along the Spanish Costas.

He was born in Fulham, London, in 1939 and had a varied career from 16-year-old deck boy in the Mercantile Marine to working for the Ministry of Defence.  He became a London nightclub proprietor before taking up crime reporting.  In 1990 he and his wife Nikki moved to Spain to share a house with a delinquent Persian cat in a mountain village in Sierra Aitana.

Open Mind

Backpackers

Dagobert D Runes, Philosopher and Author (1902-1982)

Definition: Coddiwomple