Damn dentists

"Damn dentists" is the debut novel by Leo Duca: a sharp-edged psychological thriller centered on a man who lost everything and decided to take back something far darker than money. Roberto Salinas was a provincial accountant with a steady clientele and a quiet life. For twenty years, he kept the ledgers-and the secrets-of seven dentists: inflated turnovers, offshore accounts, and undeclared earnings.
He knew them better than they knew each other. He protected them. He believed that loyalty was mutual. The morning the Tax Police raided his office, he discovered it wasn't. Within forty-eight hours, one by one, the clients of a lifetime abandoned him. With excuses, with coldness, with forty-second phone calls. Disbarred and with his career destroyed at fifty-two, Roberto Salinas disappears. In his place, Mirco Marchetti is born: a man without a face, his voice distorted by an app, and a plan built on the only weapon he has left-knowledge.
He knows the numbers, the secrets, and the fears of seven people. And he knows exactly how to use them. What begins as systematic extortion turns into something far more complex when one of the seven-Gianni Magni, the most unpredictable of the group-actually vanishes during a morning run. Marchetti had nothing to do with it. But everyone believes he did. From that moment on, the scam transforms: a system of self-fueling paranoia where six people, trapped by their own greed and fear, begin to implode, suspecting and betraying one another."Damn dentists" (Maledetti Dentisti) is told in the first person, its voice alternating between the present-day revenge and flashbacks of thirty years of accumulated betrayal: dinners, toasts, embraces, and gifted watches.
Everything that looked like friendship but wasn't. This is not just a crime story; it is a story of illusions-the illusion of the man who thought he was safe because he was useful, and the illusion of those who thought they were in control because they played the right part. In the background, two figures reveal the limits of Marchetti's plan: Daniele Pinotto, the most insecure and volatile dentist, whose final breakdown triggers consequences no one calculated; and Ginevra Landen Rodani, a criminal lawyer and wife of the missing dentist, who sees the window of opportunity opened by Marchetti's chaos and steps through it with a clarity he will never achieve.
A novel about revenge as a human need and a trap. About the price of misplaced loyalty. And about the difference between those who truly break free and those who continue to settle accounts with what they've lost.