"On the morning of the 14 th of September, the pig disappeared. As statistics go, it wasn’t a particularly tragic event: pigs disappear the world over. They are slaughtered, they escape, they slip down ravines. But this pig, a male of one hundred and eighty kilos, which the malgaro Alfio Tironi had christened Napoleone, had vanished from the Malga Guì, a malga nestled in the Ledro Pre-Alps of western Trentino. It had disappeared without a trace. No gate left open. No hole in the fencing. Nothing. Just a paw print in the mud, a short distance from the enclosure. An unmistakable, large, five-toed print. “The bear!” declared Tironi over the phone, with the tone of somebody who had already come to a conclusion. “The bear’s eaten my Napoleone.” Maresciallo Angelo Penser, station commander of the Ledro Carabinieri unit, was sitting at his desk when the call came in. He was reading, for the fourth time that month, an article he had downloaded from the internet: “On the Equivalence of Mass and Energy in Expanding Relativistic Systems”. Next to his monitor, a cup of cold coffee, a photograph of Einstein and a yellow Post-it note: “God does not play dice”. Maresciallo Penser was forty-two years old, with a straight-forward career, an obsession for theoretical physics and an atavistic love for the theatre, which his colleagues tolerated as much as one tolerates sand in their underwear..." You’ll soon be able to find it on Amazon in English and German. If you can wait until summer 2027, Steve will be happy to sign it for you and write a dedication. You can ask for it directly to Steve in reception or soon in Amazon