To Each His Own
SynopsisPlot
This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done you will die. But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. The next day he and his hunting companion are both dead. The police investigation is inconclusive. However, a modest high school teacher with a literary bent has noticed a clue that, he believes, will allow him to trace the killer. Patiently, methodically, he begins to untangle a web of erotic intrigue and political calculation. But the results of his amateur sleuthing are unexpected—and tragic.
Story
About this book
A pharmacist named Manno receives an anonymous letter declaring that he will die for something he has done. The threat is puzzling because Manno cannot identify any offense that would provoke it. The following day, he and a hunting companion are both shot dead. Police look into the killings but reach no firm conclusions, and the case drifts toward being filed away.
A quiet high school teacher with a habit of close reading notices something in the threatening letter that the investigators missed. Believing this detail can lead him to the killer, he begins his own careful, methodical inquiry. What he uncovers is a tangle of sexual intrigue and political calculation rooted in the social hierarchies of a Sicilian town. His inquiry pulls him into territory where secrets are guarded by silence and mutual obligation rather than by law.
Leonardo Sciascia set the novel in Sicily, the landscape he returned to throughout his writing life. The story works as both a crime narrative and a study of how power, complicity, and unspoken agreements shape ordinary life in a community where official institutions offer little clarity, and where an outsider's curiosity carries its own risks.
