Byline: Marcel Berlins

RECENTLY THERE HAS been a welcome surge in English translations of first-rate Italian crime fiction.

The latest writer to benefit is Gianrico Cartofiglio, a judge in the southern port of Bari, famous there for his courageous anti-Mafia stance. His first novel, Involuntary Witness (Bitter Lemon Press, Pounds 8.99; offer Pounds 8.54), is a stunner. The narrator, Guido Guerrieri, a trial advocate in his late thirties, is unable to cope with his wife's defection. His work and his health are suffering; he's depressed and has panic attacks.

A woman comes to his office and asks him to take on the defence of her Senegalese husband, charged with the murder of a nine-year-old boy in a nearby seaside resort. She hasn't the money to pay him properly, and when he looks at the evidence, he can see no possible way of getting the accused man off. Of course, he takes on the case.

That is hardly an...