In today’s world we are besieged by violence. So we shut ourselves up at home, close the door, imagining that we’ve raised a drawbridge and are finally protected from any kind of danger. But it’s right there that an enemy might be hiding, one we know, someone we’re used to seeing who can unexpectedly change into our murderer. Good neighbour relationships increasingly seem to be a legacy of a society in peril of extinction: everyone is closed, suspicious of others or ignores them. Sharing a common space is difficult: banal arguments and senseless fights can change incomprehension into antipathy and intolerance into resentment which lead to uncontrollable hatred that can produce a homicide, even a massacre. Sometimes a baby’s crying or a dog’s barking is enough to unleash lethal fury. Uniting their experience as investigative journalists and a rare capacity for psychological penetration, Claudio Brachino and Barbara Benedettelli examine some of these atrocious crimes. Starting from the Erba massacre – the event that encompasses in itself all the elements of the tragic phenomenon – tell us about some of the murders that have severely shaken public opinion: the death of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, for which three of her friends accuse each other; Concetta Barbagallo’s death, murdered for a small loan; young Tamara Monti’s end, stabbed to death because her dogs barked too much; the unsolved murders in Rome of Christa Wanninger and Simonetta Cesaroni; and other stories of deaths, as the cold bureaucratic formula goes, “for trivial reasons”. The authors have thoroughly investigated every aspect of a scabrous reality, aligning themselves firmly and clearly with the victims and their families, describing all their agony and pain. This is a book written to remember the victims, whose blood dries all too quickly in our memories.