Gaspare Grammatico returns with a new case for Nenè Indelicato

There is a sultry evening in July, there is Tosca which should be rehearsing at the theater of the Villa Comunale in Trapani, there is a great Polish soprano ready to sing. However, the man who should guide everything is missing: Viviano Baldi, Genoese conductor, thirty years of international career and never-failing punctuality.

The next morning, after a violent storm, Baldi is found dead in a bed and breakfast. The immediate hypothesis is a heart attack. But, as often happens in the novels of Gaspare Grammaticowe must never stop at the surface of things.

It starts like this “The Crab Mentality”new investigation by commissioner Nenè Indelicato, published by Giallo Mondadori. The novel, 252 pages, takes readers back to the Trapani chosen by Grammatico as a narrative territory. A city that is not a simple backdrop and becomes, page after page, a living organism, with its contradictions, irony, private wounds and mysteries that broaden the single investigative case to open a glimpse into a much broader reality.

This time Nenè finds himself facing an investigation “locked like a safe“: solid alibis, opaque relationships, a network of relationships that resists any attempt to tear it apart. While the commissioner tries to understand what lies behind the death of Maestro Baldi, another case opens on the other side of the city: a boy disappears while diving in the sea. The alarm is raised by the betrothed, supported by a family that refuses the idea of giving up. The two events begin to touch each other, then to link up, to the point of building a double narrative movement: the public mystery and the pressure private.

Because Nenè Indelicato, since its first appearance, has not been built like an infallible or charismatic investigator in the most conventional sense of the genre. If anything, he is a commissioner “without superpowers”, a man who solves cases thanks to the ability to listen, observe, get into the cracks of others. His main gift is empathy, which in Grammatico’s novels becomes a method of investigation but also the character’s vulnerability.

Indelicato had appeared for the first time in “A question of balance”, published by Mondadori in 2023, and then Trapani was shaken by the discovery of the corpse of a tortured man in the cellar of a villa. That novel made an immediate impression the double register of the series: the mystery, with its mechanics of clues and misdirections, and the domestic life of the inspector, the only father of Sara, who grew up with him after her mother abandoned her.

In the second chapter, “The thorns of the prickly pear”, the city became the theater of a darker and more disturbing sequence: macabre packages with human teeth delivered to a radio and a newspaper, the disappearance of two young women, apparently unrelated attacks and a climate of minute, almost contagious violence. Even there the investigation proceeded together with the relationship with Sara, now a teenager, and Nenè’s difficulty in reconciling the role of policeman with that of father.

With “The Crab Mentality” this line deepens. Sara is sixteen years old and demands answers that her father is not yet ready to give her. Nenè’s past resurfaces with his emotional debts, while the investigation into the death of the orchestra conductor and the disappearance of the boy at sea forces him once again to deal with what you can’t see: the omissions, the half-truths, the family loyalties, the fears that keep people together.

Grammatico continues to work inside a recognizable tradition of Mediterranean crime fictionbut with a personal twist: less interested in the detective’s heroism than in his emotional display. The author defined Indelicato as “a simple man”, always balanced between work and private life, melancholic, unresolved, linked to reading, music and his city. A recurring team moves alongside him, from deputy Salvina Russo to inspector Sansica, who contributes to giving continuity and a choral tone to the series.

Born in Trapani, Grammatico lives between Turin and Milan and has worked for years as a television writer in the “Fratelli di Crozza” team. “A question of balance” was a finalist for the 2023 Fedeli prize, while “Le thorne del ficodindia” reached the 2025 City of Erice Literary Prize. With the new novel, Nenè Indelicato’s series adds another piece to its narrative world: a Trapani where the sea is never just a landscape, the crime is never just an enigma and the truth, before arriving, always tends to walk sideways.