Sandrone Dazieri Books in Order

If you want to follow Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre from the beginning: Kill the Father → Kill the Angel → Kill the King.
If you like intricate, high stakes conspiracies: Kill the Father → Kill the Angel → Kill the King.
If you prefer a standalone psychological thriller about memory and identity: In a Heartbeat.(fictiondb.com)

Sandrone Dazieri was born in Cremona, in northern Italy, in 1964 and grew up far from the literary world he would later enter. He trained at a hotel management school in San Pellegrino Terme and spent around a decade working as a cook, traveling across Italy and learning how to stay calm in hot, crowded kitchens.(en.wikipedia.org)

Eventually he moved to Milan, enrolled in political science, and found himself without a stable place to live. For a while he slept on trains or in occupied buildings, becoming involved with the city’s social center movement and especially the Leoncavallo collective, where politics, music, and debates about housing and the environment filled his nights.(it.wikipedia.org)

During these years he took whatever work he could find, from porter to warehouse hand to bouncer, watching how power and desperation played out on the street. Those experiences, and the friendships he made in the alternative scene, would later surface in the gritty urban backdrops and outsider heroes of his fiction, especially the Gorilla novels.(en.wikipedia.org)

In 1992 Dazieri took a job as a proofreader at the Telepress editorial service, a move that pulled him closer to publishing. Within a few years he was running the Milan office, freelancing as a journalist, and writing about genre fiction and counterculture for newspapers and magazines, which sharpened his eye for how stories work.(en.wikipedia.org)

His breakthrough came in 1999 with Attenti al gorilla, the first book in a crime series about Sandrone, a Milan investigator who shares his creator’s name and activist past, but carries an added twist, a second personality known as the Socio who embodies his colder, strategic side. The Gorilla books mix dark humor, noir plots, and a deep sympathy for people on the margins of the city.(en.wikipedia.org)

Alongside the Gorilla series, Dazieri wrote standalones that push at the edges of crime fiction. In È stato un attimo, published in English as In a Heartbeat, he follows Santo, a man who wakes after an electric shock to find that more than a decade of his life and memories have vanished, turning a conventional thriller into a sharp story about identity, social change, and the cost of ambition.(books.apple.com)

In the 2010s he created another memorable pairing, Rome police officer Colomba Caselli and the reclusive savant Dante Torre, introduced in Kill the Father and followed in Kill the Angel and Kill the King. These novels move from parks outside Rome to trains, canals, and small towns across Italy, blending serial killer tension, political intrigue, and the aftershocks of terrorism into wide ranging conspiracies.(en.wikipedia.org)

Off the page, Dazieri has spent years shaping other people’s stories as well. He co founded the Colorado Noir publishing house with filmmaker Gabriele Salvatores and producer Maurizio Totti, headed a major crime list and a children’s list for a large Italian publisher, and has written or supervised scripts for films and television crime dramas.(en.wikipedia.org)

Across all of this work, certain themes repeat, the pull between rebellion and responsibility, the scars left by violence, and the uneasy line between justice and revenge. His characters tend to be damaged, stubborn, and more loyal to people than to institutions, whether it is the split minded Gorilla, the amnesiac Santo, or the haunted partnership of Colomba and Dante.(it.wikipedia.org)

Today Dazieri continues to live and work in Italy, writing novels and screenplays that keep one foot in classic noir and the other in contemporary fears. Recent Italian releases such as Il male che gli uomini fanno and Il figlio del mago show him still experimenting with form and genre while staying close to the crime stories that first brought him an international readership.(it.wikipedia.org)