There's something peculiar to famous vacation spots that make a lot of us forget that people actually live in them. My cousin is Florentine and got married in the Palazzo Vecchio, but even upon laying eyes on it in real life, I thought of it as a building Medicis used to haunt. Later I realized it was the place from which Hannibal Lecter hung a disemboweled police detective. Only after all that did the words, "Your cousin got married there, moron," occur to me, but that's because I was processing Florence as something that existed in media, had a Renaissance, then went into hibernation for several centuries until I could show up with my digital Olympus and a Lonely Planet.

Imagine, then, the disconnect of appreciating a famed vacation spot as the site of a string of gristly murders. This is the topic of thriller writer Douglas Preston (perhaps best known for The Relic) and Italian journalist Mario Spezi's non-fiction account,

The Monster of Florence. In it, they detail the killings of 16 people from 1968-1985, and the increasingly labyrinthian, crackpot and unjust investigations of the same — which even bizarrely turned against the authors themselves.

The first half of the book unfolds like a well-written true crime tale. It follows Spezi as he stumbles into covering the first killings for his newspaper, La Nazione, then becomes more involved in the lore of "The Monster" as he interviews principal witnesses, victims' families and those accused of being the killer or killers. While some reviewers label this the tensest and most engrossing part of the book, I think they miss the mark. This is largely the sort of story a reader can experience in an A&E documentary — or, as in my case, in a longish Atlantic Monthly article Preston wrote about the case before this book was published.

What's most engrossing about the story are the perversions of justice and logic surrounding the multiple prosecutions. There's the convicted daughter-rapist Pietro Pacciani, who becomes something of a folk hero for raving against surprise unnamed witnesses who later turn out to be his so-called "picnicking friends" and include a literal village idiot, a dipsomaniacal prostitute, and a man with the ability to embroider his testimony years after the fact to perfectly match the needs of investigators. There's the ruined pharmacist, put on trial for five murders because he may have killed a doctor in another town (who probably drowned and whose body investigators claim was swapped before exhumation), because a pharmacist is a job distantly related to a surgeon and thus one possible explanation for mutilated victims, and because of the testimony of his schizophrenic wife who was institutionalized during events of which she claimed knowledge.

I refuse to judge any nation's justice system only by its failures, but the scope of the legal absurdities surrounding The Monster case is absolutely dumbfounding. Chief Inspector of the Florentine Police Michele Giuttari transforms an old-fashioned stone Tuscan doorstop into an "esoteric object used to communicate between this world and the infernal regions," in a spin on the investigation that departs all probability, embraces the occult and even reaches far back enough to tie-in Aleister Crowley. Meanwhile, the public prosecutor for Perugia Giuliano Mignini secretly exploits anti-terror legislation to commission several legally dubious wiretaps, indict people while keeping the charges and evidence against them secret, bug Spezi's car and later imprison him in connection with The Monster killings and indict Preston for perjury, telling him to leave the country and never come back. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes more likely that this man suffers some sort of uncontrollable compulsion or is literally insane, because his official statements frequently mirror the verbiage or a truly lunatic woman conspiracy theorist whose website apparently has every nutball feature on it short of an embedded-eye pyramid with the words "UNITED NATIONS ARMY OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER" written on it surrounded by glittering swastikas.

To call the story corking doesn't do it justice, because one of the most fascinating parts of the sensational narrative is how it realizes the mundane for a foreign audience. Florentines are no mere caretakers of an old beautiful culture, simply sweeping up and waiting to serve you a refreshing Pellegrino as soon as you tire of touring. These are people who often can't afford to move away from mom and dad until marriage and thus routinely put themselves in harm's way by trysting in the very hills that The Monster prowled. They are terrified, but as powerful a motivator as terror is, well, there's passion too. These are people who take a faceless killer and created him in their own image, because to a certain extent every people's nightmare is uniquely their own. More strikingly, this is a culture vastly different from the sleekly scientific police procedurals with which we fetishize crime and punishment — a strangely ad hoc and unfettered juridical process with a Carrollesque absence of accountability.

Sprinkled along the way are famous names we recognize (Thomas Harris and his Dr. Lecter pop up regularly), hardworking citizens and even aristocracy. Perhaps the most astute observations in the book come from Count Niccolò Capponi (from the same famous family in whose library Dr. Lecter works as caretaker in Hannibal). Despite Preston's occasionally irksome self-righteousness about his "investigation," his namedropping and his casual mention of doing something "normal" that actually only "really rich" or "really famous" people get to do, the Capponi conversations routinely perfectly capture the zeitgeist of an event Preston tries to relate:

"Dietrologia. That is the only Italian word you need to know to understand the Monster of Florence investigation. Dietro—behind. Logia—the study of. Dietrologia is the idea that the obvious thing cannot be the truth. There is always something hidden behind, dietro. It isn't quite what you Americans call conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory implies theory, something uncertain, a possibility. The dietrologist deals only in fact. This is how it really is.... At all costs, they have to find something behind the apparent reality. There cannot not be something. Why? Because it's not possible that the thing you see is the truth. Nothing is simple, nothing is as it seems." (221-2) 

This observation from the Count in particular serves as a peculiar but apt summary of an engrossingly strange book. It's a true horror story whose horror for the last 24 years has come largely from the side of law and order, from the ostensible attempt to apply reason to madness.