Gomorrah - Italy's Other Mafia by Roberto Saviano

The Italian journalist, whose bestselling indictment of the country's Neopolitan mafia has inspired an acclaimed film, is in hiding from mobsters who threaten he'll be dead by Christmas. Dealing in drugs, arms, construction, waste-dumping and high-end fashion, which bring in $233 billion a year, the Camorra operate throughout Europe and the world; it's not just a problem of the backward south of Italy. Gritty, often heartbreaking, this menacing exposé holds you by the throat.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Published to coincide with the eponymous blockbuster film, Roberto Saviano's groundbreaking and utterly compelling book is a major international bestseller. Since publishing his searing expose of their criminal activities, the author has received so many death threats from the Camorra that he has been assigned police protection. Known by insiders as 'the System', the Camorra, an organized crime network with a global reach and large stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs and toxic-waste disposal, exerts a malign grip on cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast is the deciding factor in why Campania has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and why cancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years. In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer and on a construction site, both controlled by 'the System', and as a waiter at a Camorra wedding. Born in Naples, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to help an eighteen-year-old victim, left for dead in the street. "Gomorrah" is both a bold and engrossing piece of investigative writing and one heroic young man's impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.