**From the best-selling author of** The Name of the Rose **and** The Prague Cemetery, **a novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder** A newspaper committed to blackmail and mud slinging, rather than reporting the news. A paranoid editor, walking through the streets of Milan, reconstructing fifty years of history against the backdrop of a plot involving the cadaver of Mussolini’s double. The murder of Pope John Paul I, the CIA, red terrorists handled by secret services, twenty years of bloodshed, and events that seem outlandish until the BBC proves them true. A fragile love story between two born losers, a failed ghost writer, and a vulnerable girl, who specializes in celebrity gossip yet cries over the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh. And then a dead body that suddenly appears in a back alley in Milan. Set in 1992 and foreshadowing the mysteries and follies of the following twenty years, *Numero Zero* is a scintillating take on our times from the best-selling author of *The Name of the Rose* and *Foucault’s Pendulum.*