Corrado Fortuna takes us right into his stories and when you look at his characters it is impossible not to look at yourself. — Antonella Lattanzi

A tense and atmospheric crime set in a sour and barren Sicily as you have never seen it before, with a fascinating, troubled girl at its centre and an unfathomable mystery hidden in the woods.

Forty-year-old journalist Tancredi Pisciotta is going through a hard period after the death of his brother. He returns to Piano Battaglia, his Sicilian childhood home, for the summer holidays. The town is nestled in the Northern Sicilian mountains, a suggestive landscape far from the sea and the beaches full of tourists, a place where nature is still wild, enigmatic and authentic.

Suddenly, Tancredi ends up in the midst of a bloody crime scene: while he is walking in the woods, he finds a young Moroccan shepherd, Amir, lying in the pool of his blood after his head was smashed with an iron bar.

People at the bar of Piano Battaglia begin to murmur. Amidst them, there is Angela, the owner’s daughter, always lonely and silent. She is a twenty-year-old girl, blonde and wildly beautiful, who hasn’t spoken since she was six. Inside her eyes there are secrets bigger than her. It will be up to Tancredi to earn her trust to solve Amir’s murder, with whom Angela shared a special bond. Tancredi will bring back truths hidden for years, questioning certainties, affections and memories and discovering that forty years before, during the night when the last wolf of the mountains was killed, something terrible and unforgivable also happened.

L’ultimo lupo digs beneath the surface of ordinary lives and explores themes of guilt and redemption, innocence and violence. Beautiful descriptions of the mountains and happy childhood memories in Sicily are interwoven with unsettling and destructive secrets. A book that pursues a mystery, the kind that can never be completely solved as it goes beyond good and evil — to the inexplicable.