Everything started from that day.

The memory of 31 August 1969 has been at the back of Commissario Michele Balistreri's mind for over four decades. It was not only the day that preceded Colonel Muammar Gadaffi's seizure of power in Balistreri's birthplace of Libya, drastically altering his and his country's destiny, but that on which his beloved mother Natalia fell to her death, and the resulting suicide verdict that Balistreri - now Head of Homicide in Rome - has always suspected to be a flagrant cover-up for her murder.

The memory of 23 July 2006 has been at the front of investigative journalist Linda Nardi's mind for the past five years. Ever since her and Balistreri together thwarted a phantom-like killer stalking Rome, Nardi has been intent on shedding further light on the Vatican Bank's shadowy involvement in the abominations uncovered that summer. But now Linda will find her attention diverted to an equally irresistible assignment: the collapse of Colonel Gadaffi's forty-two year dictatorship.

The Memory of Evil is the earth-shattering finale to Roberto Costantini's internationally bestselling trilogy, in which one woman will encounter a long-entombed truth in the rubble of Gadaffi's Tripoli: unearthing a conspiracy neither she, nor the man it was designed to protect, will ever be able to erase from their minds.