Despicable Fields

The city of Rome is agitated and distraught as every news broadcast opens with coverage of the shocking murder of two women, committed by an incredibly clever serial killer, who manages to vanish without a trace and who repeatedly mocks the police with the sarcastic notes he leaves behind at the murder scene. Money, power, drug cartels, and street gangs are mixed up in this affair, and everyone suspects everyone else. The murdered women worked as prostitutes in a nightclub with a dubious reputation, La Casa, located on Rome’s prestigious and famous Veneto Street, and the young chief of the Via Veneto police station, Ricardo Lombardi, along with retired police commander Katherine Smith, his former boss, are up to their necks in the investigation that seeks to find the murderer. Their task is made particularly difficult due to the wily yet good-hearted staff members of La Casa, who do everything to protect their nightclub’s important clientele, which includes senior members of the police force and Rome’s municipal authorities. This is the city to which Bridget Sleiter, an adventurous and penniless young woman, has traveled from her home in distant Stockholm, in order to study physics at one of the city’s universities. On the threshold of starvation, she answers a newspaper ad and soon begins work as a waitress and cigarette seller at the La Casa nightclub. At La Casa, Bridget meets many of the kind-hearted but shrewd players in Rome’s nightlife and intertwines her fate with theirs. When she falls in love with the Via Veneto police station commander’s best friend, the mysterious Count Antonio della Torre, scion of one of Rome’s most respected aristocratic families, Bridget unwittingly finds herself involved in the very heart of the crime scenes. As she embarks on a dangerous journey, she gradually uncovers the secrets of street life, organized crime, and the drug market in Italy.