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One beautiful day, Paradisi, a former assessor for an insurance
company, is killed, decapitated by the dredger he has rented to go looking
for something in some swamp. A short time later the operator of the
dredger is found hanging from the ceiling of his appartment. An apparent
murder and suicide, isn't it ?
Only inspector Peretti (George Hilton) seems to disagree, because not
only did the dredger operator have no motive to kill Paradisi, also his
suicide doesn't look too real. And when Paradisi's wife (Helga Liné) is
killed too - in bright daylight, in the post office -, he is sure this is
a murder case. But the only thing to go on is a kid's drawing of a hut in
the immediate neighbourhood of the swamp Paradisi was killed at ... and
suddenly, Peretti finds himself drawn into a murdercase from 3 years ago,
where a little girl (Lara Wendel) was kidnapped and held for ransom. But
when the girl's father tried to track down the kidnappers n his own, both
he and she were killed.
For Peretti it becomes obvious that he's on the right track when the
girl's teacher (Patty Shepard) is killed as well, horribly sawed up with
an electric saw in her own appartment.
Soon, Peretti makes acquaintance with the girl's family, her mother
(Dana Ghia), who has gone a litle mad ever since the incident, the girl's
father's brother Alessandro (Piero Lulli), who seems to be a terible
weakling in every sense of the word, his wife Carla (Mónica Randall), who
seems to detest him - and everyone else -, the other brother Beniamino
(Alfredo Mayo), who seems to have an unhealthy predilection for young
girls, if you know what I mean, and the mother's brother Canavese (William
Berger), a transport businessman who's just too sleazy to be innocent.
Peretti is sure one of them did it, but he just lacks one vital
evidence to pin it onto whoever-it-was, and he has no idea what that
evidence might be ... until he visits the place where the girl and her
father were foudn dead - incidnetly just above the place where Paradisi
was found dead -, and starts asking himself the right questions ... what
was Paradisi looking for ? And soon it dawns on him that it must be a
message the little girl has written onto a mirror and thrown into the
swamp. Only, the mirror has long been fished out of the swamp by a local
trashcollector (Dante Maggio) - who is soon enough killed -, who gave it
to his girlfriend (Lola Gaos) - before his death of course.
And there, Peretti finds the mirror, which ultimately proves that
weakling Alessandro was the killer ...
Despite the fact that some plottwists of this giallo are terribly
contrived (which is not uncommon to the giallo-genre as such) and the
killer is ultimately pulled out of the head rather than found by clever
deduction, this is a tense murder mystery with some quite gruesome
murders, extended suspense scenes and the plot moving along at a steady
pace. It might be no genre masterpiece, but it's really good
entertainment.
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