"Lone Wolf"

Michael Gregorio is the pen name of Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio. Best known for their Hanno Stiffeniis series, featuring a Prussian magistrate in a country invaded by Napoleon and the French, they have more recently launched a contemporary series set in Italy, where they live. The Seb Cangio novels follow the exploits of a forest ranger as he combats Mafia infiltration of the unspoilt national park in Umbria where he works.

The authors applied the Page 69 Test to their latest novel, the third in the series, Lone Wolf, and reported the following:

It’s always intriguing to open your novel at a specific page and see what you’ve got.

In the case of Lone Wolf, page 69 finds all of the major characters – with one notable exception – on the same page. Marshall McLuhan, the inventor of the page 69 test, would be ninety-nine percent pleased!

The good guys – Seb Cangio, gorgeous Lucia Rossi of the Italian carabinieri, and Inspector Desmond Harris from New Scotland Yard – are cooped up inside a tiny surveillance booth. They’re watching a security video of passengers arriving on a flight from London as they go through customs control at the small provincial airport of Assisi in Italy.

The reader doesn’t know it yet, but two of the people in the video are already dead.

Dead men don’t talk, of course, but a video can tell you a lot about them. One man is nervous, the other is not. They ignore each other, yet both men were carrying false passports. Is it a coincidence, or is it a conspiracy? And one of them went back to London, while the other man did not. If they were together, what the heck were they doing in Italy?

That is what the investigators have to discover.

The solution will turn out to be far more disturbing than the reader might imagine.

Why bring a British brain surgeon to Italy? And why are so many Italian doctors dropping like flies? Above all, what does the fearsome ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, have to do with it?

Only Seb Cangio can read the signs. He’s from Calabria, he knows how the ’Ndrangheta works.

But even Seb cannot guess exactly what is going on. Not until he finds himself laid out helpless on an operating table in a private clinic in idyllic Umbria…

The ‘one notable exception’ mentioned above is one of the most frightening men alive, as Seb Cangio is destined to discover. Our editor asked us to add an extra chapter featuring ’Ndrangheta boss, Don Michele Cucciarilli – “he’s so deliciously evil,” she said.

Visit Michael Gregorio's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Cry Wolf.

My Book, The Movie: Cry Wolf.

--Marshal Zeringue