Equal Danger

District Attorney Varga is shot dead. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Are these random murders, or part of a conspiracy? Inspector Rogas thinks he might know, but as soon as he makes progress he is transferred and encouraged to pin the crimes on the Left. And yet how committed are the cynical, fashionable, comfortable revolutionaries to revolutionor anything? Who is doing what to whom? Equal Dangeris set in an imaginary country, one that seems all too real. It is the most extremeand grippingdepiction of the politics of paranoia by Leonardo Sciascia, master of the metaphysical detective novel.

Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) was born in Racamulto, Sicily. Starting in the 1950s, he established himself in Italy as a novelist and essayist, and also as a controversial commentator on political affairs. Among his many other books are Salt on the Wound, a biography of a Sicilian town, The Council of Egypt, an historical novel, and Todo Modo, a book in a genre that Sciascia could be said to have invented: the metaphysical mystery.

Carlin Romano is a critic at large for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and a former president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is also the author of America the Philosophical, and divides his time between teaching at Ursinus College and the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.