Salamandra

Raven is a hit man who is commissioned to go to Sicily to find the whereabouts of Virginia, a girl on the run, and return with her to Rome. The problem is that she is the daughter of Matteo Santoro, a former Palermo boss, and all of them -including Raven himself- still have enemies in the city. Raven, an unscrupulous man, remembers a previous stay in Palermo and his relations with the mafia. As they feared, someone will try to kidnap the young woman -presumably to demand ransom from her father- and the protagonists have to flee through Sicily with the kidnappers on their heels. True to the types and settings of the crime novel, "Salamandra" also evokes the classic western. Raven, as the gunman played by John Wayne in "Desert Centaurs", must venture into hostile territory to bring back the girl kidnapped by "the Redskins." Of admirable conciseness and dryness, in the vein of the great masters of the genre -Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett-, "Salamandra" provides a solid description of the ins and outs of the Sicilian mafia, as rigorously documented as it is forceful in its veracity.