Changes

The beginnings of this noir thriller are the hero, named Marco 'The Alligator', trawling through any lowlife stereotypes he can find - snitches, hookers, transvestite hookers, and more. But as the story opens out while at the same time the threesome close in on whodunit, the thrust of the story is laid bare. This is a fractured, new Europe. The Mafia are spreading corruption from their traditional grounds, and finding competition from other, even more desperate, groups of people.

The way they solve their situation - and then some - has a pleasing narrative flow, but there are flaws to this. They find their implausible scenario too easy to get out of, and they know just who to turn to for a bribe, a favour, a bit of pressure, in order to learn more. We however don't know them - for a book with a first person singular narrator, it's surprising how much the triplet are a corpus we cannot penetrate enough, and the three characters are as one in our impressions too often and too much.