Beneath the Mountain

November 20, 2017
D’Andrea’s superb debut thriller mines the darkness that hides beneath the surface of Siebenhoch, a beautiful, remote Italian village. New Yorker Jeremiah Salinger, a documentary filmmaker, nearly loses his mind after he’s the only one to survive a disastrous shoot in the Dolomite mountains involving the region’s rescue group. With the support of his Italian wife, his five-year-old daughter, and his father-in-law, Salinger comes back from the brink. Meanwhile, he becomes obsessed with the never-solved murder and dismemberment of three students in the Bletterbach Gorge in 1985. His interest in the case comes to the attention of the local head of the forest rangers, who warns him not to dig up the past. Undeterred, Salinger unearths some sinister secrets, but revealing the truth could cost him his family and his life. D’Andrea makes excellent use of his unusual setting, its idiosyncratic denizens, and the troubled Salinger’s outsider status. A genuinely unexpected denouement hits like a freight train, perfectly bringing together all the pieces of a macabre, utterly riveting puzzle. Agent: Piergiorgio Nicolazzini, Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency.

September 15, 2017

Documentary filmmaker Jeremiah Salinger has moved with his family to his wife's hometown in the Italian Alps. He is settling in and starting a new television series about the mountain rescue team when tragedy strikes the group, leaving him the only survivor. While recovering, he starts poking into local history and learns of a 30-year-old unsolved triple murder. As he becomes more determined (his wife, Annelise, would say obsessed) to understand what happened, he risks alienating his new friends and possibly losing his family. The remote spot where the crime occurred has long had a reputation for evil, and there are even whispers about supernatural goings-on in the darker corners of the mountain range. VERDICT This Italian debut is a satisfying mystery with building tension and a dramatic and unusual setting that will appeal to armchair travelers eager to explore beyond Venice or Rome.--Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green

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Starred review from November 15, 2017
Pared to its essence, this is the story of a young American man, Jeremiah Salinger, who relocates to the small Italian mountain town in the Alto Adige, in the Dolomite Alps, where his wife grew up. Soon after arriving, he becomes obsessed with the savage, unsolved murder of three young people who were hacked to death in 1985. But former schoolteacher D'Andrea, who also grew up there, has a lot more in mind than a crime. His portrait of a region that many readers will not have heard of is multidimensionalsociological, geographical, climatological, and geological. The region is a place of small villages whose inhabitants are suspicious of outsiders and never forget the transgressions of lifelong neighbors. It's a place where German and Ladin are more commonly spoken than Italian. It's a place once very poor that has, through tourism, become Italy's wealthiest region. It's a place of avalanches, rock slides, glaciers, crevasses, and deadly self-regenerating storms fueled by the mountains. It's also a magnificent laboratory for paleobiologists studying fossils of creatures that lived 200 million years ago. But D'Andrea isn't just providing a social-studies class; he puts Salinger into blizzards, crevasses, and even caves beneath the mountains. Indeed, Salinger's obsession is fueled partly by PTSD brought on by being caught in a glacier's crevasse and listening to the hissing of the Beast. Beneath the Mountain is a grand tale that appeals on many levels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)