It’s a quiet day in the Rome Questura. Nic Costa is out on a job. Leo Falcone is on holiday. Teresa Lupo is in Venice on business.
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And Gianni Peroni is feeling at a loose end. Never a good sign. Mooching around with no boss at hand he wanders into the Questura morgue and sees Teresa’s deputy staring at two newly-arrived corpses. One is the body of a wealthy psychiatrist recovered from the river, apparently after committing suicide. The second is the corpse of a young Roma petty criminal, seemingly beaten to death in a different part of the city, perhaps as some gang vendetta.

Peroni watched the pathologist start to work with the corpses and notices something extraordinary. Both are wearing odd socks. Identical odd socks. On two very different men.

So begins a single day in the life of this genial, inquisitive, unruly old cop as he comes up against managerial incompetence, petty bureaucracy and a touch of rampant ageism when he tries to get to the bottom of the riddle.

Rejected, Peroni sets out on his own to talk to the relatives of both dead men and try to solve, in a matter of hours, two strange deaths which the sharp young officers in suits he’s left behind haven’t begun to unravel.

Dead Men’s Socks is s a 9,000-word short story written for Amazon UK’s new Short Reads promotion and available for instant delivery through Kindle for just 99p. This is the first short story I’ve written about my little team in the Rome Questura. I hope you like it — and that it won’t be the last.