Foreign Affairs - Hugh Fleetwood

Paolo Levin, concert pianist living in Rome, is being followed by an emaciated and crippled young man. He stands outside Paolo's apartment and watches the pianist. For weeks the young man shadows Paolo. He starts to show up dressed exactly like Paolo. After several failed attempts to get the stalker to explain himself the young man speaks: "I wish you would speak in English. I don't understand a damn word of Italian." Everything changes when Paolo tracks the young man to an apartment building in the Via Francesco Crispi. Shortly after the young man enters Paolo knocks on the door. He is taken aback when a young woman answers. Paolo soon discovers this is the young man's sister. From then on the terror truly begins.What begins as an early stalker novel (before such things dominated crime fiction) soon turns into a devilish tale of control, obsessive love, bizarre torture, and mind games. Paolo is hardly a protagonist we want to root for. On page one of the novel we discover he is vain…