This book is brilliant - stop reading this drivel and go buy it now!

If someone presented this tale to you and told you they had just made it up, it was a figment of their imagination then you would read it and enjoy it but at the back of your mind you would probably think that at times it had gone a bit too far, it was a bit too far-fetched from reality. Some of the stuff which happens would never happen in real-life would it?

If you then were told that in actual fact this was all a true story based entirely on events which happened in the recent past then you would never take that on board as being the truth.

Knowing that it’s true from the outset means that you spend a fairly substantial part of the book shaking yout head in disbelief that what is happening is for real.

I’m being deliberately vague in all this as I don’t want to spoil the story if you do decide to read it. In a nutshell though, the main thrust of the book follows the events which “featured” a killer who became known as The Monster of Florence. No prizes for guessing this story is based in Italy then, where Mario Spezi was a crime correspondent for a newspaper who covered the killings as they began relatively quietly before becoming a national and then international phenomenon as the number of bodies grew and grew. You can think of him as the modern and Italian version of Jack the Ripper.

The other author of the book, Douglas Preston, a writer of fiction in his day job, actually joins Mario in being someone caught up in the story which they are now telling. The how and why is covered in the book and there’s no point in me explaining it here, suffice to say that it’s when these two become part of the story they are trying to tell that things take a real turn towards the very unbelievable!

But believable or not, it’s the truth and is all the more remarkable for it.

I’m not sure why, but this whole story passed me by despite it all unfolding during my lifetime - some of it very recently indeed. Even the book only came to my attention when Richard Bacon posted a message on Twitter urging people to read it as it was the most amazing of tales - and so right he was.

As a work of fiction this story behind this book would be right up there with the best, but as a work of pure and simple fact it takes some beating.