‘A complex, tautly-written thriller ... one you won’t see through in a hurry’
Woman's World

‘Williams has created an endearing character.... The contemporary Italian background is as interesting as the accomplished plot’
Sunday Times

‘With its expert dialogue, realistic characterisation and evocative sense of time and place, this is a sophisticated thriller’
Irish Times

‘The dialogue is a joy ... in this taut, ingenious novel. Long live Trotti’
Financial Times

Don't expect neat resolutions, though. Like Donna Leon, Williams refuses neat endings and portrays even more definitively than Leon the corruption that forecloses justice in Italy. What Williams does, at least in the first two books, is to tie Trotti's investigations into the big picture of Italian politics and society, through Moro's kidnapping in Converging Parallels/The Red Citroën and a pervasive social plague that I won't mention (just remember that "Beta" is the second letter in the alphabet when it crops up in the name of an organization) in The Puppeteer: The title of the first book in the U.K. refers to a speech by Moro, and the title of the second refers to a phrase uttered by a darker figure in Italian history

http://internationalnoir.blogspot.com/2010/09/second-commissario-trotti-book-by.html

The Metal Green Mercedes
Timothy Williams / Author St. Martin's Press $14.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-312-53090-7
Commissario Trotti of the police in a northern Italian urban center was introduced in Williams's applauded debut, The Red Citroen. In this mesmerizing novel, the gentle officer is estivating at Lake Garda when a man breakfasting at the next table is fatally shot. Although Trotti is out of his jurisdiction, he becomes active in the investigation after two gangsters kidnap and beat him and are later found murdered in his car. The commissario learns that the first victim had been using an alias while writing a newspaper report on a crime which had involved Trotti 20 years earlier. The journalist isn't the only one posing as somebody else in a maze of tortuous circumstances that keep the reader on the qui vive. Williams, a gifted storyteller, has created another stupendous mystery to which he adds accounts of Trotti's personal troubles that increase the reader's responses to the detective's humanity.

Publisher's Weekly