About this ebook
DCI Eric Shaw, leading a forensic team at Scotland Yard, together with DI Miriam Leroux from a Murder Investigation Team, is investigating the death of a known offender. Killed by two gunshots: one to his neck, execution style, but preceded by another to his groin, implying a more personal motive.
Shaw’s attention at work is often distracted by a young forensic investigator, Adele Pennington, who is a beautiful woman over two decades his junior. However, his attraction to her is unreciprocated.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the London police, an anonymous blog describes the details of a very similar crime. The author of the blog signs herself as Mina, like one of the victims in a case Shaw investigated many years ago.
Twenty years ago Eric saved her.
Who will save him now?
Meet DCI Eric Shaw . . . and his pupil.
This book is written in British English.
“The opening of the novel immediately throws the reader into the heart of the story, and the expectation grows in the following pages. [...]
In the characters, the nuances are more important than the well-defined contours. [...]
The result is a surprising ending.” - Thriller Nord
“The Italian thriller that conquered England and the USA.” - La Repubblica
An international bestseller with more than 170,000 readers around the world.
The Detective Eric Shaw Trilogy
Set between 2014 and 2017, the Detective Eric Shaw Trilogy has as the main character a detective chief inspector leading a forensic team assisting police detectives in their investigations at Scotland Yard.
DCI Shaw is facing a crucial period in his life. Excessive dedication to work caused his marriage to fail and turned him into a cop ready to break more than one rule to satisfy his obsession with bringing criminals to justice. His already precarious balance is undermined by a forensic investigator on his team who is much younger than him, Adele Pennington, for whom he has feelings that he considers inappropriate given the age difference, and by a series of murders on which he investigates together with his god-daughter DI Miriam Leroux. They bear similarities to a 1994 cold case in which Eric himself rescued a seven-year-old girl from a crime scene, the only witness to the massacre of her family.
In this psychological crime thriller series, the border between investigation and crime becomes blurred in a story that isn’t only about finding the culprit, but rather observing how the main character decides to react to his shocking findings. In a dark game of deception and suspense, the reader will be thrown into modern-day London and will end up wondering where the line between good and evil, justice and revenge really is.
The trilogy includes the following novels:
1) The Mentor;
2) Syndrome;
3) Beyond the Limit.
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli is an Italian science fiction and thriller author.
She has lived in Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) since 1993, earning a degree in biology and working as a writer, scientific and literary translator, and freelance web copywriter. In the past she also worked as researcher, tutor and professor’s assistant in the field of ecology at ‘Dipartimento di Biologia Animale ed Ecologia’ of the University of Cagliari.
Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli is an Italian science fiction and thriller author.
She has lived in Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) since 1993, earning a degree in biology and working as a writer, scientific and literary translator, and freelance web copywriter. In the past she also worked as researcher, tutor and professor’s assistant in the field of ecology at ‘Dipartimento di Biologia Animale ed Ecologia’ of the University of Cagliari.
She has written original fiction since 2009.
In 2012-2013 she wrote and published a hard science fiction series set on Mars and titled Deserto rosso.
The whole Deserto rosso series was also published as omnibus in December 2013 and hit No. 1 on the Italian Kindle Store in November 2014.
Deserto rosso was published in English, with the title Red Desert, between 2014 and 2015.
It includes the following books: Red Desert - Point of No Return, Red Desert - People of Mars, Red Desert - Invisible Enemy, and Red Desert - Back Home.
She also authored three crime thrillers in the Detective Eric Shaw Trilogy – The Mentor (Il mentore, 2014), Syndrome (Sindrome, 2016), and Beyond the Limit (Oltre il limite, 2017) –, an action thriller titled Kindred Intentions (Affinità d’intenti, 2015), five more science fiction novels – L’isola di Gaia (2014), Per caso (2015), Ophir. Codice vivente (2016), Sirius. In caduta libera (2018), and Nave stellare Aurora (2020) – and a non-fiction book titled Self-publishing lab. Il mestiere dell’autoeditore (2020).
Her crime thriller The Mentor was first published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015 and became an international bestseller hitting No. 1 on the Kindle Store in USA, UK, and Australia in October 2015. This is a new edition of The Mentor (published in November 2022). The other two books in the trilogy, Syndrome and Beyond the Limit, are expected in 2023.
She’s also a podcaster at FantascientifiCast, an Italian podcast about science fiction, an Italian Representative of Mars Initiative, and a member of the International Thriller Writers organization.
She’s often a guest both in Italy and abroad during book fairs, including Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino (Turin Book Fair) and Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair), local publishing events as well as university conferences, where she gives speeches about self-publishing and genre fiction writing. She has also taught a class on self-publishing at the University of Insubria (Varese, Italy) since 2016.
Her books have been reviewed or recommended by national magazines and newspapers such as Wired Italia, Tom’s Hardware Italia, La Repubblica, Tiscali News and Global Science (magazine of the Italian Space Agency).
As a science fiction and Star Wars fan, she is known in the Italian online community by her nickname, Anakina.
