Ultras are often compared to punks, Hell's Angels, hooligans or the South American Barras Bravas. But in truth, they are a thoroughly Italian phenomenon... From the author of The Dark Heart of Italy, Blood on the Altar and A Place of Refuge. Italy's ultras are the most organised and violent fans in European football. Many groups have evolved into criminal gangs, involved in ticket-touting, drug-dealing and murder. A cross between the Hell's Angels and hooligans, they're often the foot-soldiers of the Mafia and have been instrumental in the rise of the far-right. But the purist ultras say that they are are insurgents fighting against a police state and modern football. Only amongst the ultras, they say, can you find belonging, community and a sacred concept of sport. They champion not just their teams, they say, but their forgotten suburbs and the dispossessed. Through the prism of the ultras, Jones crafts a compelling...

Castagnetti, a bee-keeping private detective, is hired by a businessman to find out who set fire to his car and why. It seems like a dead-end case, nothing more than an instance of mindless vandalism. But before long the businessman is receiving threatening phone calls, his factory is burnt to the ground and an employee loses his life. Castagnetti traces similar cases of arson across the city and realises that this sort of systematic intimidation happens when the owner's land is about to be redesignated as residential. The last person to stand in the developers' way was whacked in Milan a year ago. Castagnetti needs to solve the case before his client, and his city, are both buried in cement.

A beautiful teenage girl, Simona Biondi, has gone missing from her home in the Italian capital. Castagnetti, the private detective hired by her parents, trawls the streets of Rome, finding himself drawn into the dark, erotic world of a TV empire belonging to a media mogul turned politician called Mario Di Angelo.He unearths a murky world in which nubile young women, desperate for stardom, are prepared to do anything to get a break; in which powerful men are happy to exploit that desperation in order to make money and make love. Castagnetti discovers that Anna Sartori, a young woman on the fringes of the Di Angelo empire, went missing almost twenty years ago. Anna Sartori's best friend, he finds out, was Simona's sister. This is a world, Castagnetti realises, where secrets are like fireworks: you don't see them until they explode.