The German Client: A Bacci Pagano Investigation

Some wars never end.

Genoa, Italy, 1944. Tilde is nobody in particular, just a nineteen-year-old girl working in a factory – and the perfect courier for the local partisan group fighting to throw the Germans out of Italy. Arrested while bicycling along a country road, she is taken to the local Gestapo headquarters, interrogated, and locked in a cell. There is an informant among the partisans and she will die without knowing who betrayed her.
Instead, she is released by a German officer, Captain Hessen, over the objections of her interrogator. Why? Is it another German trick or something more? Trapped between the Gestapo and the Partisans, Tilde is launched on a collision course with love, danger, and betrayal that will shape her life and the lives of those who come after her.

Genoa, Italy, 2025. Private investigator Bacci Pagano can’t resist taking the bait when his new client dangles a check with too many zeros. He should have known that where there’s bait, there’s always a hook.
Commissioned by an elderly German to find his Italian half-brother, Pagano must discover what really happened all those years ago. But someone is determined to keep the past buried . . . at any cost. In Italy, the past never dies. But it can kill.

Originally published in Italian as Rossoamaro, The German Client elegantly intertwines a wartime thriller about Nazi-occupied Genoa with the gritty realism of Pagano’s current investigation in what La Repubblica called “a masterful tale.”
While some of the specific events are (probably) fictional, the history has been painstakingly researched down to the smallest detail. A 2022 Pulpwood Queens Book Club selection and nominated for a National Book Award, The German Client spent five weeks on the Corriere della Sera best seller list and won the Azzeccagarbugli Prize for Best Mystery.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BRUNO MORCHIO, one of Italy’s best-selling mystery writers, lives and works in Genoa as a psychologist and psychotherapist. He is the author of over a dozen novels and is the recipient of multiple awards. With this novel he won the Azzeccagarbugli Prize for Best Mystery and remained five weeks on the Corriere della Sera Best Seller list.