2026

Each of the two novellas and seven stories in this book unfolds in the form of a judicial enquiry or inquest in which Sciascia's formidable forensic skills are brought to bear on an unresolved mystery from the Inquisition or some later dangerous time. "Death of an Inquisitor," the novella that Sciascia loved best amongst his writings and which haunted him throughout his life, is an investigation into the murder of a minister of the Inquisition. But it is the motive and the near impossibility of teasing it out from surviving records rather than the crime itself that holds our attention. "The Little Chronicles" are dazzling, sardonic investigative tales with settings ranging from seventeenth century Sicily to Chile under Pinochet. In "The Captain and the Witch," Sciascia directs a merciless, ironic beam of light onto the fate of a woman whose power of sexual attraction so terrifies her master that, believing her to be a witch, he abandons her, then, rediscovering her years later in the house of a friend, feels compelled to deliver her to "justice."