"Cry Wolf"

Michael Gregorio is the pen name of Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio. They live in Spoleto, Italy. Michael Gregorio was awarded the Umbria del Cuore prize in 2007.

They applied the Page 69 Test to their latest novel, Cry Wolf, and reported the following:

“Cry Wolf is a hard-boiled thriller written at break-neck pace of political corruption and organised, very violent crime,” Mike Ripley generously noted on his Getting Away With Murder blog when the book appeared in England a few months ago.

As we read page 69, a couple of violent mafia slayings already under our belts, we are in the company of the cocky Hillary Clinton-type female president of an unnamed province in central Italy. She is about to meet a police officer who will change her life. It isn’t that Donatella Pignatti – known to her underlings as the Queen – has led an innocent life: she is as corrupt and unscrupulous as every other political and social climber in the book, though no rival to the ruthless members of the ’ndrangheta clan (the mafia from Calabria in the south of Italy) who are building their criminal empire on her terrain.

The Queen is waiting anxiously for the arrival of a man that the reader has met earlier, General Arturo Corsini, ambitious commander of the national carabinieri special ops squad. Corsini intends to propose a deal that the Queen cannot refuse, a strategy which will entangle the lives of all the main characters in the novel, and cost far more than most of them have bargained for. Unaware of what is in store for her, and weighed down by her own guilty secrets, the Queen tries to guess on Page 69 what this media-famous policeman wants from her. She’s certain that he wants something. Everyone wants more than they’ve already got, no matter how successful they are. As she confides to her male secretary, Paolo Gualducci, the night before she had dreamt of receiving a string of pearls. “Wow! A gift’s a good sign,” Paolo says to encourage her, but the superstitious Queen sees things differently. “Pearls mean tears,” she snaps back.

So, what will General Corsini bring her, riches or woe?

You have to read the book to find out, of course, but we can promise you lots of jolts and violent surprises on the way.

Visit Michael Gregorio's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: A Visible Darkness.

The Page 69 Test: Unholy Awakening.

My Book, The Movie: Michael Gregorio's Hanno Stiffeniis novels.

--Marshal Zeringue