Anna Sergi is Professor in Criminology at the University of Essex, but she is no ordinary criminologist. As a result, these pages contain something far, far more than criminological analysis.

The first thing that distinguishes her is that she was born and brought up in Calabria, the Italian region (the ‘toe of the boot’) which has been afflicted by its own mafia organization, the ‘ndrangheta, since the 1880s and possibly even earlier. Moreover, Anna's father, Pantaleone Sergi, is one of the grandi firme, the ‘great signatures’ of Calabrian and Italian journalism; he is also a man who (as I can personally attest) is a mine of information and anecdotes about the ‘ndrangheta, whose bloody history he has charted since the 1970s.

For Anna, therefore, Europe’s most powerful underworld network could never be just an object of analysis. It has been there from the earliest years her memory can reach, when it was something that surrounded her, something from which she could never be completely sheltered, something she sensed more than saw, something that has left her with questions to which she still seeks answers today.

For all its deep Calabrian roots, the ‘ndrangheta is the most global of criminal networks. Anna has followed it to its furthest outposts: Australia, Canada, the United States. At the same time, she has also explored its subtly varying manifestations in different parts of Calabria – that most centreless of Italian regions. The experience, as she candidly lays out in this book, could only be a test of emotion as well as of intellectual method and interpretation.

Herein lies the great fascination of this highly unusual, ambitious and honest volume. It blends analytical reflection and travelogue, autobiography and exposition. Anna is never afraid to air doubts and uncertainties, to leave questions open when there is no definitive answer to be found, to think things through, to make an ally of doubt. Her writing is by turns scientific and poetic, denunciatory and meditative. Everywhere she travels, she finds distorting mirrors of her own Calabrian identity.