Works of art that have disappeared, stubborn mountain farmers, and a grotesquely staged murder: their latest case takes South Tyrol’s investigator duo to the Passeier Valley.
On the edge of a forest, Commissario Grauner and his Neapolitan colleague Saltapepe find themselves confronted with the gruesomely mangled corpse of a man. The inhabitants of the nearby village refuse to speak. No one wants to admit to really having known the dead man, an impoverished painter. It’s only an art expert who finally provides the decisive clue: the way the corpse was found was based on a painting by Botticelli, which has been puzzling people since the end of World War II: Venere nei boschi – Venus in the woods. While Saltapepe travels all the way to Florence to find out more about the painting’s history, Grauner investigates in the depths of a mine. When a dark rumbling begins, he suspects that, this time, he may have risked too much.
