Born into a family of shepherds in Italy's rugged Calabria, Criaco was a University of Bologna-degreed lawyer until he published this book to huge international clamor in 2008 (there's even a multi-award-winning film, released in 2014). In Calabria's Aspromonte Mountains, three friends—smart Luciano, cheerful Luigi, and a nameless, dark-hearted narrator—escape poverty via a life of crime. Drawing on history and mountain lore as he exposes the 'Ndrangheta, the region's pervasive Mafia, Criaco shows us that violence leads inevitably to more violence.

Set in Calabria, Criaco's debut suffers from its unnamed narrator's lack of emotional reaction to the violence he commits. The narrator, along with his friends Luciano and Luigi, grew up used to their families' involvement in holding hostages, known as swine, for ransom on behalf of the mob. The narrator recalls that by "the age of nineteen we had stolen, robbed, kidnapped, and killed. In a world we rejected because it was not our own, we took anything and everything we wanted." The characters don't get any more sympathetic as they become drug traffickers in the 1980s and 1990s, aware of the deaths they were responsible for, but only interested in the wealth and influence yielded by narcotics dealing. Some events in their lives, such as the summer that they rooted for Italy in the World Cup final, are passed over too quickly to leave much of an impression. While the narrator ultimately claims to accept some degree of moral responsibility for his friends' crimes, that rings hollow. Others have done a better job of getting inside the head of an amoral killer and making his mindset a little less alien. (Mar.)