The worldwide bestselling novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder from the acclaimed author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery

1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce’s death remain controversial.

1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can’t resist to ghostwrite a memoir. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns of the editor’s paranoid theory that Mussolini’s corpse was a body double and part of a wider Fascist plot. It’s the scoop the newspaper desperately needs. The evidence? He’s working on it.

It’s all there: media hoaxes, Mafiosi, the CIA, the Pentagon, blackmail, love, gossip, and murder. A clash of forces that have shaped Italy since World War II—from Mussolini to Berlusconi. “Farcical, serious, satiric, and tragic,” (Le Point), Numero Zero is the work of a master storyteller.