So when popular author Douglas Preston arrived in Florence to write
a novel and contacted Spezi for research purposes, he stumbled onto a real-life
mystery more compelling than the fiction he had planned. In the first part of The Monster Of Florence, he retraces Spezi's involvement with the '80s
investigations, weaving an increasingly maddening tale of promising leads left
hanging and ambitious prosecutors framing the innocent. In the second, Preston
reveals how his own attempts to revive the case in the early 2000s led to Spezi
becoming a suspect and Preston being indicted for his association with the
journalist.
The Monster Of Florence is the most exasperating
true-crime book in years, because the Italian authorities seem determined to
spin the wildest fantasies rather than following actual clues. The so-called
"Sardinian Trail," a line of inquiry focusing on an insular group of families
from Sardinia who originally imported the murder weapon, was abandoned when the
judge could not close the case. Instead, mental defectives, prostitutes, and
other motley characters were used to implicate a group of "picnicking friends"
whom the prosecution painted as the leaders in an orgiastic Satanic cult. When
Preston is questioned about whether he and Spezi planted evidence to prove
their version of the crime, the book's through-the-looking-glass tension is
almost unbearable. Although The Monster Of Florence doesn't solve the case,
presenting only a likely story, its headlong rush into the horror of official
incompetence is more than compensation for the real-life loose ends.
