"A novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder."--
1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain controversial. 1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can't resist to ghostwrite a book. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns of the editor's paranoid theory that Mussolini's corpse was a body double and part of a wider Fascist plot. It's the scoop the newspaper desperately needs, The evidence? He's working on it. It's all here: media hoaxes, Mafiosi, the CIA, the Pentagon, blackmail, love, gossip, and murder. A clash of forces that have shaped Italy since World War II---from Mussolini to Berlusconi. --From book jacket.
1992 Milan. Colonna is offered a fee he can't resist to ghostwrite a book. The subject: a newspaper committed to blackmail and mud slinging, rather than reporting the news. The editor of the paper has a theory that years ago Mussolini's death was faked; in fact, that almost every major news story in Italy's history was a media hoax or a conspiracy. Years of bloodshed and events that seem outlandish-- until the BBC proves them true. And then a dead body appears in a back alley in Milan....