Our book today is The Dogs of Rome, Conor Fitzgerald’s 2010 debut mystery novel starring Commissario Alec Blume, who was born and raised in America but who, 17 years ago, lost his parents to the gunfire of a violent bank robbery while visiting Rome. A grief-stricken young Blume joined the police force instead of returning to America, rose through the ranks, and is a chief commissioner on the Roman force when we meet him at the beginning of this novel, as much a resident alien in Rome as he would be in America if he were to return.

But he’s not the first person we meet. We’ve talked here on “Mystery Monday” (which I’d have attended to earlier if it weren’t a wretched federal mail-holiday, since wretched federal mail-holidays all feel like Sundays) about the art of the creepy opening scene, and in The Dogs of Rome, Fitzgerald gives us not one but two: first, we meet assured, bombastic animal rights activist Arturo Clemente, who’s dallying in his Rome apartment with his mistress Manuela while his wife, Green Party MP Svena Romagnolo, is out of town. Just after Maneula leaves, Clemente, still in his bathrobe, answers the door and admits a grocery delivery man – who immediately starts acting so strange that Clemente asks him to leave. When it’s clear the man isn’t going to leave, impossible thoughts start to intrude on Clemente’s morning:

Arturo’s mind raced back over the years. An old friend. An old enemy. A debt of some sort. He had never had debts. A more recent encounter, then. Manuela? Surely not. He couldn’t work it out. A joke. They were filming this? He wasn’t famous enough yet.

Not a joke. A theft. This was a home invasion by a robber. Incredible, but obvious, too.

Violence erupts, and Clemente is murdered, but Fitzgerald isn’t done; he next gives us a chapter of the killer in Clemente’s apartment as the body oozes blood – a long enough scene to thoroughly disturb us, but neither long enough nor explicit enough to tell us much about the killer or the crime. This kind of scene is enormously difficult to pull off, and Fitzgerald manages it like a pro.

It’s only after that scene that our hero enters the action, pausing on the threshold to question a cop who got there first:

“On a scale of one to ten, how bad is it in there?”

“A scale of one to ten? I don’t know – two, three?”

“That low?”

“No children, no rape, just one body, not even that young. Corpse fresh, so not much of a smell, no wailing relatives, no animals, no public, no reporters yet.”

One thing the cop doesn’t need to add is something Blume can see for himself: the murder has attracted an inordinate share of departmental brass, who are hovering around, walking through the crime scene, because the involvement of Svena Romagnolo, and hence the government, makes the case high-profile. As a result, Blume spends more time in the book’s opening sections trying to unravel the mystery of why his superiors are so concerned about the murder as he does trying to unravel the murder itself.

In Blume, Fitzgerald gives us a close variation on the stolid working stiffs so inexplicably popular in Scandinavian crime fiction, although he stirs in some caustic edges for variety’s sake (speculating that the killer may have had a rough upbringing, Blume says, “I’m always pleased when I find out an assassin had a lousy childhood. It means they got what they deserve, even if they had to pay in advance” – which is a very genuinely Roman-sounding non sequitur). His Blume is fairly observant, and before all sorts of outside influences (politicians! Police administrators! The Mafia!) start to pull him away from the crime, he manages to think through some of its quirky little details, like the fact that the killer apparently stuffed a towel at the bottom of the apartment door:

The killer had placed them there because he thought the blood might run under the door. Someone who watched horror flicks or played video games might think that. If the killer was someone who watched those movies and thought he’d have a go at it in real life, then Clemente was just a random victim.

Blume did not like the idea of total randomness. Yet he did not believe there was anything professional or political in the murder, either. The truth lay somewhere in between.

The Dogs of Rome caught my eye when it first came out, but I didn’t actually get around to reading it until this Christmas-time just ended, when an alter cocker who occasionally reviews fiction for a great metropolitan newspaper found me a copy at Niantic’s mighty Book Barn. The book is extremely satisfying, full of slang and vinegar, refreshingly non-programmatic – the kind of mystery-thriller that you just know will stand up well to re-readings. I don’t know if that’s also true for all the other books in the series, but now I aim to find out.