Broken Truths: A Novel

by Alessandro Robecchi, Gregory Conti (Translator)

Genres: Mystery

288 pages, Paperback

Published May 19, 2026

About the author

Alessandro Robecchi (Milano, 16 giugno 1960) è un giornalista, autore televisivo e scrittore italiano. L'esordio nella narrativa risale al 2014, con il noir Questa non è una canzone d'amore (Sellerio, 2014), giunto alla sesta edizione e tradotto nel 2018 in Spagna (Ediciones Salamandra). Protagonista del romanzo e di quelli successivi è Carlo Monterossi, un ex autore televisivo, nauseato dalla televisione, che si trasforma in detective.

Reviews

[Hunter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is certainly not a traditional mystery novel. The mystery in the present is largely investigated off-page by characters other than the protagonist and he receives updates about it throughout his own story.

What this book mainly is, is an exploration about the more subtle forms of censorship in art. The protagonist, Manlio Parrini, is a famous old film maker who is coming out of retirement to make one last movie but is struggling to get it funded without making significant changes because the studios are all more concerned with profitability than with art. The movie he is trying to make meanwhile is about an Italian author from the 1930s who was forced to revise his books Mussolini's regime because even though they were entirely apolitical detective stories, they still did not fit within the state story that crime no longer existed in fascist Italy.

The one thing that is very off-putting about this book is the writing style. The syntax and punctuation of many sentences comes across as very strange in a way that I strongly suspect comes from the translation.

[Heidi Rauch · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. This is a mess.