The Bastards of Pizzofalcone Books in Order

The Bastards of Pizzofalcone series shifts de Giovanni's focus to a small, disgraced police station in contemporary Naples. The Pizzofalcone precinct has been gutted after several officers are caught dealing drugs, and the department's plan is to keep it barely functioning until they can close it. Into this mess come the replacements, a handful of cops transferred from other units because they are inconvenient, difficult, or viewed as failures.

Inspector Giuseppe Lojacono arrives with the nickname the Chinaman and the lingering suspicion of Mafia ties from his past. Commissioner Luigi Palma is a work obsessed leader sent in to quietly wind down the station. Francesco Romano has a hair trigger temper, Alessandra Di Nardo is fighting expectations at home and at work, Marco Aragona desperately wants to be seen as a heroic detective, and veterans Giorgio Pisanelli and Ottavia Calabrese are carrying their own private griefs.

They are called the Bastards because no one inside or outside the force expects them to succeed.

Instead of folding, the squad throws itself into the cases that land on their desks. In The Bastards of Pizzofalcone they investigate the murder of a wealthy benefactor whose death could finish the station for good. Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone links a child kidnapping to a high end burglary. Cold for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone opens with a brutal double homicide in a poor neighborhood, while later books like Puppies and Bread revolve around an abandoned baby, missing pets, and the killing of a beloved baker.

The crimes are serious, sometimes grim, but the tone of the series mixes procedural tension with dry humor and an eye for daily life. Each novel spends time inside the heads of victims, suspects, and officers, showing how money, family pressure, and old secrets shape the choices people make. The precinct's fight to escape closure and earn respect gives the books an ongoing arc that sits alongside the individual mysteries.

Across the series readers watch the Bastards slowly become a team and, in some ways, a found family. Romantic entanglements, health scares, and ethical dilemmas run in the background of the investigations, and side characters from the neighborhood return from book to book. The stories have also been adapted for Italian television, but the novels give more room to the squad's inner lives and to the streets they patrol.

New readers can jump straight in with The Bastards of Pizzofalcone or, for extra context, start with The Crocodile, which shows how Lojacono earned his reputation before he ever set foot in the station.