Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowThe Bottom of Your Heart
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreIn the middle of a summer heat wave, as Naples prepares for one of its most important holy days, a renowned surgeon falls to his death from the window of his office. For Commissario Ricciardi and Brigadier Maione, it is the beginning of an investigation that will bring them into contact with the most torrid, conflicting, and enduring of human passions. In the world Ricciardi and Maione are about to enter, infidelity appears inextricable from the most joyful expressions of love, and this interdependence sows doubt and uncertainty in both men, compromising their own attempts at love.
Ricciardi is one of the most intriguing and unique figures to appear in crime fiction in recent years. He possesses the dubious gift of being able to see and hear the last seconds in the lives of those who have suffered a violent death. This ability makes him an unusually effective investigator but plagues him and renders human relationships almost impossible. He is a classic noir hero and the cursed son of a city that, for all its Mediterranean splendor, is a perfect noir city.
In this new installment in the Commissario Ricciardi series, Maurizio de Giovanni creates a large cast of unforgettable characters and a compelling, suspenseful plot that demonstrates once more why he is considered one of the best crime writers working today.
Maurizio de Giovanni lives and works in Naples. In 2005 he won a writing competition for unpublished authors with a short story set in the 1930s about Commissario Ricciardi, which was then turned into the first novel of a series. His books have been successfully translated into French, Spanish, and German and are now available in English.
Grover Gardner has recorded more than 650 audiobooks since beginning his career in 1981. He's been named one of the "Best Voices of the Century" as well as a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine. Gardner has garnered over 20 AudioFile Earphones Awards and is the recipient of an Audio Publishers Association Audie Award, as well as a three-time finalist. In 2005, Publishers Weekly deemed him "Audiobook Narrator of the Year."
Gardner has also narrated hundreds of audiobooks under the names Tom Parker and Alexander Adams. Among his many titles are Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge, as well as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Gardner studied Theater and Art History at Rollins College and received a Master's degree in Acting from George Washington University. He lives in Oregon with his significant other and daughter.
Antony Shugaar’s recent translations include A Pimp’s Notes by Giorgio Faletti, The Nun by Simonetta Agnello Hornby, Bandit Love by Massimo Carlotto, and Sandokan by Nanni Balestrini, for which he received an NEA translation fellowship. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Reviews
“De Giovanni’s complex, lyrical seventh whodunit set in Fascist Italy finds Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, a public safety officer in Naples who has been cursed with the ability to see images of the recently dead, even more miserable than usual after a romantic failure…A searing look at the tortured soul of the lead makes this entry especially memorable.”
“Crime and punishment are only a single strand of an intricately layered whodunit set in Fascist Naples…A richly textured story whose murder is nothing more than the point of entry.”
Expand reviews