A powerful novel with strong characters which permeate your senses with their intensity. It is so alive you want to turn it into a film.' Marco D'Amore (Ciro di Marzo in Gomorra) 'A fast-paced powerful novel with the characters so well delineated you feel that you hear them talking.' Maurizio de Giovanni, author of the Inspector Ricciardi novels. A tragic event changes Ciro Incoronato's life and he takes solace in crack cocaine and living in a fantasy world of his own creation. He has a life of violence and crime as a minor member of a Camorra crime family and gets his kicks by chasing the cars of young women up and down the Naples ring road, called by the locals La Strada degli Americani (The American Road). We see the world through his eyes and the havoc he causes through the eyes of others; a thirty-year-old factory worker Carmine Scognamiglio, a beautiful young music student Martina Marinelli and ultimately the Naples lawcourts. Giuseppe Miale di Mauro gives us a work of fiction based on true events which is as unforgettable and powerful as Roberto Savinio's Gomorra. 'Naples Noir: La Strada degli Americani by Giuseppe Miale di Mauro, translated by Thomas Fazi is a brutal, fast-paced Italian thriller, full of bad language and very bad people. When Carmine Scognamiglio is laid off from his wood-working factory job, he runs into an old acquaintance who rejoices in the name of Ciro Incoronato. Ciro is now a cokehead hoodlum, and soon Carmine finds himself enmeshed in a violent world. Ciro does odd jobs for a criminal gang he wants desperately to be part of, and to make his mark agrees to murder a woman who is about to testify against the head of the gang. He also torches the factory where Carmine worked, as an act of retribution. It's clear that Ciro has more than one screw loose. Haunted by the death of his wife and son in a car accident, the deluded, drug-addled man is convinced that his son is still alive, and directs much of his conversation to the phantom boy as he careers round Naples's ring road terrorising women drivers. Accompanying him on a succession of violent chases, Carmine is a helpless witness to the fevered action. Many crime thrillers have an implicit promise of redemption in their pages, but there is none of that in Naples Noir. Only Carmine, the one innocent in the drama, shows penitence, and it seems that only he will pay a price. Grim and darkly ironic, this is a terrific read.' Andrew Rosenheim in The Spectator