Promised lands
Used - While researching a failed 18th-century Utopian settlement, an embittered history professor with Utopian ideas for transforming his school draws parallels between history and his own life. In the meantime, his wife has her own Utopian ideas wherein their handicapped son would become mankind's savior. A sublimely engrossing novel about idealism and exile.

The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
A master craftsman of the hardboiled detective genre, Raymond Chandler defined a paradigm and inspired a host of imitators in fiction, film, and television. Devastating femme fatales, wry and incorruptible detectives, gritty urban landscapes—his work established the basic vocabulary of the genre.

Double Indemnity
by James M. Cain
Directed by Billy Wilder and co-scripted by hardboiled master Raymond Chandler. This film takes Cain's riveting and complex plot and pulls out all the stops—from dramatic lighting borrowed from the German Expressionist silent films Wilder had worked on earlier in his career, to a tightly wound plot and a classic femme fatale. The results are staggering.

Vanishing ACT
Used - Rock star Jesse Slade disappeared under mysterious circumstances several years ago. Now, as Nancy and her friends Bess and George watch a television retrospective on Slade's life, they notice something, and Nancy vows to reopen the case and solve the mystery.

La Splendida Storia Dell'eremo E Dell'abbazia Di San Galgano
Used

Nightmare Alley
by William Lindsay Gresham
This portrait of the seedy lives of carnies takes one of noir's favorite milieus and yields a harrowing portrait of one man's descent into degradation. The storyline details a carnival mentalist's rapid rise to, and inevitable fall from, the big time. The fallen carny suffers the ultimate degradation: he finds himself playing the geek in a sideshow.

The Asphalt Jungle
by W. R. Burnett
Burnett set the pace for the noir movie genre in Hollywood, with works such as Little Caesar, High Sierra, and The Asphalt Jungle. He wrote 36 books, 60 screenplays and dozens of short stories. His early fiction fits into the genre of pre-war gangster fiction, a genre that exerted a potent influence on the the writing that would come to be known as hardboiled.

I Dipinti murali e l'edicola marmorea del Tempietto sul Clitunno
Used

Kiss Me, Deadly
by Mickey Spillane
Spillane's Mike Hammer is known for his terse, sardonic language, righteously vengeful moral stance, and aggressive, take-no-prisoners attitude. As Hammer says in Kiss Me, Deadly, "There's no such thing as innocence—innocence touched with guilt is as good a deal as you can get."