L’eremo dei folli

L’eremo dei folli is a Sicilian forensic thriller about June McFlynn, a brilliant forensic entomologist with blue-shadowed blond hair, a yellow Hummer, a trauma-drenched past, and a habit of solving crimes by reading insects more intelligently than everyone else reads people. It wants to be a procedural, a feminist domestic-violence novel, a mother-daughter trauma story, a romance, a small-town Sicilian mystery, a spiritual-healing narrative, and a showcase for forensic entomology. Mostly, it is an over-engineered genre machine that keeps mistaking mirrored wounds for depth and keeps arranging every clue so that it points not only to the case, but back at June’s pain.

The prologue gives June her origin myth. At ten, dragged by her military father to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, she is horrified by bones, bullets, and mutilated bodies. Her father tells her to be strong because “their” work is not for weak stomachs. June wanders away and hears a guide explaining how flies can solve murders by detecting blood humans cannot see. A bee enters the room; other children panic, but June stays still and understands herself through the unwanted insect. Like the bee in her childhood storybook, she will not be cute and harmless. She will be useful, feared, and necessary.

Years later, June is back in Sicily, living in San Ferdinando and running the Centro interdisciplinare di ricerca in Scienze forensi, bought into existence by her powerful American general father as part gift, part bargain. She has returned from a more promising career in the United States to care for her mother, who is declining into dementia. Her life is built on science, control, routines, larvae, reports, court testimony, and the hope that data can do what emotions cannot: stay clean.