Contrasto publishes Un fitto mistero by Giancarlo De Cataldo for its In Parole series. In this book, the author recounts some of the most heinous and egregious crimes in Italian and international history from the last century to the present. "Why do certain crimes attract so much of our attention and others leave us indifferent?" asks De Cataldo in the introduction to the volume. This phenomenon is not only due to how journalists propose events, often "reinventing" the case, forcing us to feel pain for the victim or pity for the murderer. In fact, no matter how much reporters may "inflate" events with their reporting, certain crime incidents are destined to survive in history and collective memory beyond objectivity. The author investigates precisely those differential elements that may have contributed in certain cases to focus attention on certain crimes. Alongside De Cataldo's texts, the volume is accompanied by the photographs that dominated the front pages of newspapers at the time of the events recounted. The cases recounted by the author are grouped by major themes in eight sections: Family Crimes; Conspiracies; Mafia; Business Crimes; Political Crimes; Monsters&Co; Red Light Crimes.  The common thread linking them all is not only the clamor they aroused, but the fact that they were the first to be the subject of widespread media coverage, inaugurating the hunt for the scoop, and inscribing themselves in the collective imagination to the point of becoming a source of inspiration for artists, writers, and musicians. From the events of the Magliana gang to the monster of Florence, via Jack the Ripper, and on to the bloodbaths of the Mafia and the Red Brigades, Giancarlo De Cataldo analyzes and recounts illustrious, almost iconic crimes that have filled the pages of the crime chronicle to the point of being imprinted in everyone's culture and memory. Whether business crimes, such as the Sonzogno case, or red-light murders, such as the Black Dahlia murder, what astonished and impressed the public most of all was the dynamics of these killings.