In a Heartbeat

Sandrone Dazieri's In a Heartbeat (E' stato un attimo in its original Italian), brought to you by the publishers of Giorgio Scerbanenco's Private Venus, is one of the harder to classify crime novels you're likely to read.

Its protagonist, a young, ruthless, highly successful advertising executive named Santo, suffers a traumatic injury that robs him of fourteen years of memory. That takes him back to his time as a young, low-level drug dealer who wouldn't know the Internet if it stood up and bit him on the culo.

The clashes between Santo's past life and his suddenly unfamiliar present offers rich opportunity for drama, comedy, satire, pointed observation on the ways of business, and an ending that's—  But you'll have to read the book.

Professional ethics bar me from posting a review, but I hope its prose is just so and its punctuation perfect.

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Read a chapter from In a Heartbeat at the Hersilia Press website.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

An impeccably edited crime novel—I hope!

Sandrone Dazieri's In a Heartbeat is a wild ride of a novel about a successful advertising executive deprived by a severe electrical shock of fourteen years of memories.

This takes him back to his youthful past as a small-time cocaine dealer, and naturally he can't remember how he got all this money, a fine house and sports car, and a beautiful girlfriend—or why someone wants him dead. This is a thriller, a kind of time-travel book, a story about the sometimes humorous confrontation between selves, a bit of a satire of adverting.

Professional ethics prevent me from reviewing the book formally, but I hope that it reads well, that it has few or no typographical errors, and that its punctuation is impeccable.

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In a Heartbeat is published by Hersilia Press, specialists in English translations of Italian crime fiction. Hersilia earlier published Giorgio Scerbanenco's A Private Venus, the event of the year in translated crime writing.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012