Marcel Misset Libros

In the early hours of an August 2007 morning a gunfight broke out in an Italian restaurant in Duisburg, Germany; in less than five minutes over seventy shots were fired into the bodies of six men. Both the victims and the assassins were members of the 'Ndrangheta crime organization. Calabria's Mafia had brazenly shown its savage influence outside Italy for the first time. In "The Honored Society" award-winning investigative reporter Petra Reski reveals the Mafia menace lurking throughout the world-- from espresso bars in Palermo to European halls of parliament to the corporate headquarters of enormous agricultural firms. In haunting and exquisite prose she explores the Byzantine structure of the 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra and other mafia clans throughout Italy -- the code they live by, the destruction they wreak, how they operate within the country and how they operate internationally. She shows how these syndicates dominate everything from nuclear waste disposal to hotel chains to the marijuana trade in Australia and cocaine trafficked throughout the world. Reski shows how figures such as Silvio Berlusconi were made by the Mafia, and how those who dared to defy its codes were broken. A searing portrait of the criminals who have come to control not only Italy but vast swathes of the globe, "The Honored Society" is a journalistic tour de force.

In British-occupied Palestine, 1946, elderly writer Elias Lind doubts reports of his brother Raphael's death in a concentration camp. Unable to search for him himself, Elias persuades a contact in the Jewish resistance to send someone in his place. Lilya, a member of the resistance, is initially reluctant to undertake this mission, feeling it distracts from her goal of helping to establish a new state. As her comrades prepare for a significant operation, she reluctantly accepts her orders and sets off to Europe as part of the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, an aid organization for Jewish survivors. Many of these survivors, having escaped the Nazis, find themselves without family or homes due to British immigration restrictions. If Raphael is alive, he is likely among the refugees in displaced persons camps. Lilya's journey takes her from the secretive corridors of London’s Whitehall to the devastated streets of Munich and Berlin. In Föhrenwald, an overcrowded DP camp, she makes a significant breakthrough in her search. However, she soon realizes she is not alone in her quest; a dangerous adversary is shadowing her every move, intent on finding Raphael first.

In a sexually and anatomically explicit novel, Roche exposes the double bind of female sexuality, delivering a compulsively readable and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the repercussions of family trauma.