{"id":2957,"date":"2023-06-22T14:45:13","date_gmt":"2023-06-22T14:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2957"},"modified":"2023-07-13T15:28:02","modified_gmt":"2023-07-13T15:28:02","slug":"the-city-of-the-living","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2957","title":{"rendered":"The City of the Living"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>A deep, dark descent into one of Italy\u2019s most disturbing true crimes, drawing on actual documents, news reports, and interviews to tell the story.<\/strong> Billed by the publisher as a \u201cspellbinding literary thriller\u201d\u2014it\u2019s certainly spellbinding, but no one\u2019s definition of a thriller\u2014this is a slow, methodical, layered journey into the murder of 23-year-old Luca Varani. The method? Torture. The perpetrators? Manuel Foffo, who confesses to his father, while driving to a family funeral, that he killed someone\u2014three, four, five days ago?\u2014he\u2019s too drugged out to know. And Marco Prato, also from a \u201cgood family,\u201d a nightclub promoter, gay and considering transitioning. Manuel and Marco barely know each other, although after several drug-and-alcohol fueled days holed up in Manuel\u2019s apartment they develop an intimacy that\u2019s somewhat sexual but more a twisted sort of friendship. \u201cSo-called psychic contagion, like a racing engine, brought the two young men close to the point of fusion.\u201d What do they share, besides a love of drugs and alcohol? For starters, an inability to mature, jealousy of the rich, and complete irresponsibility. Lagioia intertwines the descent of Manuel and Marco with the descent of Rome itself\u2014drug filled, rat-infested, garbage strewn, home to wild animals, yet ultimately, he claims, freeing. This story begs for comparison with the Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murder of Bobby Franks in 1924 Chicago. Brilliantly translated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A deep, dark descent into one of Italy\u2019s most disturbing true crimes, drawing on actual documents, news reports, and interviews to tell the story. Billed by the publisher as a&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[92,64,124,69,59,55,52,51,122],"class_list":["post-2957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-gay","tag-international","tag-italy","tag-lgbtq","tag-literary","tag-mystery-detective","tag-psychological","tag-thrillers","tag-world-literature"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/City-of-the-Living-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/City-of-the-Living-400x600.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Brian Kenney","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}