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‘ZeroZeroZero,’ by Roberto Saviano

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By Mark Bowden

• July 20, 2015

Roberto Saviano has written a kind of concordance of cruelty in this cocaine-­trafficking epic, minus the alphabetized structure, which would have made it easier to follow. Much of it, sadly, may be true.

How much is an open question. The second chapter begins with the story of Don Arturo. We never learn exactly who this is, beyond the first name and the honorific. He is like a character out of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a rich old patriarch who in his younger days grew poppies for morphine production. ­Saviano writes of the day a general arrived at Don Arturo’s Mexican estate and set fire to his growing crop. Don Arturo watched the flames grow higher, incinerating live animals and even some peasants who had fallen asleep in his fields. While villagers feared the flames too much to attempt a rescue of their burning neighbors, the story goes, a dog braved the conflagration to pull its puppies to safety: “He remembers because it was there he learned how to recognize courage, and that cowardice tastes of human flesh.”

Neat sentence. Memorable passage. But did this actually happen? Is there ­really a Don Arturo? Field of flames? Brave dog? What in this sometimes compelling, often tedious assortment of parables, poetry, dramatic monologues, cautionary tales and horror stories is true, and what is fantasy? The cool answer, I suppose, is that we shouldn’t care.

A word about Saviano. Because of the work he did on his acclaimed first book, “Gomorrah,” he lives under constant guard. His life has been threatened by people who follow through. Some of the best passages in this book deal with these profound restrictions on his freedom, and with his determination to persevere.

“Maybe you also have to accept the burden of being a tiny superhero without a shred of power,” he writes. “Of being, in the end, a pathetic human being who has overestimated his strength merely because he’s never run up against its limits before.”

You can’t help rooting for a man who risks his life to tell true stories. In “Gomorrah,” which detailed the murderous excesses of a Neapolitan crime family, Saviano compiled his account through dogged research, working undercover in mob-associated businesses and diligently visiting the scenes of their crimes. That reporting lent chilling authenticity to the book, authenticity enhanced by the death threats that followed. I suspect that ­“ZeroZeroZero” grows out of his forced immersion in the world of his protectors, Italian police who have contacts in law enforcement worldwide. I suspect, I say, because Saviano gives little help in this regard. Sourcing is left to the imagination.

The way I see it, the book appears to blend prodigious research with conjecture. It ranges freely over decades and continents, offering a dizzying catalog of vivid characters and horrible acts. It details the sadistic ethos of violent cartel enforcers — from Los Zetas, the gang formed by deserters from the Mexican Army, to the Guatemalan gangs made up of former members of the Kaibiles, the nation’s elite counterinsurgent forces. Saviano pauses now and then to sketch the contours of the ever-evolving international drug trade, how the violent and feuding cartels of the Pablo Escobar era in Colombia gave way to a new generation of ­slicker, determinedly low-profile players; how the business shifted north; how the Italian Mafia moved in; and how clever middlemen have made themselves unimaginably rich by smoothing the rough edges of this booming illicit trade.

Along the way, Saviano takes the colorful details of narco lives and layers in his own novelistic assumptions concerning motives and beliefs, turning rap sheets into brief but surprisingly intimate portraits of people like the Italian cocaine broker Pasquale Claudio Locatelli, who is called “the Galileo of cocaine” (Saviano is fond of astronomical metaphors); the trafficker turned informant Bruno ­Fuduli; Natalia Paris, a Colombian model who marries one of her country’s most notorious narcos, and who is widowed when he is kidnapped and presumably killed; and Griselda Blanco, the Colombian “Godmother” who, pausing at one point to force a man to perform oral sex on her with a gun to his head, blazed a trail of sex and murder from Miami to Medellín. These are just a few of the figures Saviano presents as if he knows them. Bottom line: The cocaine trade is an ugly, high-stakes business that attracts extreme characters.

But it is not, as Saviano would have it, the most important of human endeavors, even if it is a huge industry. The United Nations estimated its value at $88 billion worldwide in 2008. The soft-drink industry, by comparison, is a growing $531 ­billion enterprise, while the mobile-phone market passed the trillion-dollar mark in revenue six years ago.

Nevertheless, Saviano describes a purported high-level meeting of drug lords in Acapulco in 1989 as if it were an assembly of the gods: “The future of the planet was silently being planned in this city in southwestern Mexico.” As the drug lords divvy up turf, “the new world” was “created.” Later he writes of the drug industry’s significance: “In order to understand it you have to look at this power, stare it in the face, look it right in the eye. It has built the modern world, generated a new cosmos.” The Acapulco session was, he writes, “the Big Bang.”

If it happened, that is. “It might be just a legend,” Saviano writes, “but I’ve always believed that only a legend of this sort has the necessary symbolic force to give birth to an actual foundation myth.”

There’s no law against this kind of thing, of course. Writers have been blending fiction and nonfiction since the beginnings of literature. But in the 20th century, as journalists established more professional standards, distinctions were drawn between factual and fantastical accounts, and only recently have such blends been celebrated as an exciting new literary form. In part on the basis of Saviano’s work, such efforts have been labeled N.I.E. (New Italian Epic), or the much spookier U.N.O. (Unidentified Narrative Object). The concept has prompted impressive gusts of theory, but it boils down to the point Saviano makes about the supposed “Big Bang” meeting in Acapulco. It might not have happened, but the idea of such a meeting remains important because we seem to need a “foundation myth.”

Some people may love this kind of storytelling, but to me such blends end up ­being something less than a novel, in which the author is free to craft every detail to suit her overarching purpose, and something less than nonfiction, which has the weight of truth. There is much to be said for caring about the way the world actually works. And while journalists longing for literary acceptance (and perhaps opting out of actual legwork) might warm to the supposed innovation, a book like ­“ZeroZeroZero” discards the artistic advantage of wholesale invention while settling for the squishy significance of being almost true.

Now and then Saviano acknowledges his limitations, as with Roberto Pannunzi, an Italian whom Saviano calls, in typical overstatement, “the Copernicus” of the cocaine business. He calls him this because Pannunzi was the architect of an entirely new layer of the cocaine trade, a global structure that transcended the bloody hands of Italian and Colombian and Mexican syndicates. Saviano has given us a fairly detailed portrait of the man, a wizard of a businessman, when he writes: “Some day I’d like to meet Roberto Pannunzi. To look him in the eye, but without asking him anything, because he wouldn’t tell me anything other than empty chatter fit for a journalist who writes insubstantial fluff. There’s something I’d really like to know, though: Where does he get his inner serenity? You can see he doesn’t look tormented.”

Saviano has not met Pannunzi, but he has apparently gathered a lot from his arrest photos. Me? I doubt both the man’s Copernican stature and his inner serenity at this point, since he’s locked up and serving a 12-year sentence, and I would rather hazard his evasions in the hope of ­gaining more insight than gaze at his photograph and speculate.

ZEROZEROZERO

By Roberto Saviano

Translated by Virginia Jewiss

401 pp. Penguin Press. $29.95.

Mark Bowden is the author of “Killing Pablo,” “The Finish” and “Black Hawk Down.”

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, amazon prime’s addictive thriller zerozerozero depicts a global drug deal gone wrong.

Before users are brought into play, the high stakes game of the cocaine business includes the buyers, sellers, and dealmakers. “ZeroZeroZero,” an addictive new international thriller from Amazon Prime, uses a big cocaine deal gone wrong as the spark for international drama that spans three continents. The cocaine was made in Monterrey, Mexico by the Leyra cartel, was set for transport by a boat owned by dealmakers from America (played by Gabriel Byrne , Andrea Riseborough , and Dane DeHaan ), and was on its way to Italy where the crime syndicate will distribute it to the world. In the series’ first episode, “ Sicario: Day of the Soldado ” director Stefano Sollima blows up this deal and hooks us in with Mafioso family drama, high-stakes chase scenes with Mexican cartel, and a dramatic shootout in the climax. All the while, everyone's aspirations are established, along with a disturbing sense of what they'll risk to get what they want. 

Adapted from the book by Roberto Saviano , “ZeroZeroZero” tells these different stories in alternating big chunks; sometimes the arcs will intertwine (and lead to a flashback) and sometimes an arc will be off on its own for a while. It helps keep the stories focused, and helps you keep track of most of the characters who might suddenly die—the show is primed for attentive viewing even more than binge-viewing, but you’ll want to follow its eight hour-long episodes to the end either way. I recommend doing so in doses, even though the show is held together by so many great twists that you might find yourself just watching one episode after the next.  

The weakest of the three storylines belongs to the Americans, and it’s telling that the story could still thrive on its own were “ZeroZeroZero” chopped up into three different movies. Andrea Riseborough stands out with in her performance as Emma Lynwood, the older sister (and daughter to Gabriel Byrne's Edward) trying to keep up the Lynwood family drug deal; her presence is shown to be an abrasive break from the very gendered roles of drug dealing, where Mafiosos refuse to get women involved, and the cartels are shown to put nearly-nude women to work to cut the cocaine. Like many people in this saga she can disappear and reappear from the events, but Riseborough is one of the most stable dramatic forces, working through a bizarre adventure that takes her and her brother Chris (Dane DeHaan) to Senegal and Morocco, where her unblinking management skills prove necessary in trying to keep the deal alive. DeHaan's Chris is a bit more unwieldy, especially with a backstory of a family disease that has him frantically trying to not lose his prescriptions in the process, and eventually tearing up rooms and screaming in bouts of capital-A Acting.  

Far more subtle is the story involving the the Italians, who have their own bubbling drama that rises to the surface. The series’ penchant for gorgeous, extra wide shots of each story’s horizon are the best here when detailing the peaceful cliff sides and small villages that Don Minu  (Adriano Chiaramida ) has right outside his underground bunker, where he has been ruling in seclusion. Don Minu’s hotshot grandson Stefano (Giuseppe De Domenico) forces him out of hiding with the deal, especially as Stefano tries to take over; the two enact an old school vs. new school drama that works in its slow-burns, as they tactfully try to trap and kill the other. Each time that Don Minu, or Stefano, are lead somewhere unknown for a meeting, it feels like it could be their last moment, and the script’s reoccurring chorus of someone shifting allegiances especially pops here within the stakes of their gruesome family backstory. 

This is revealed to be a business where you can either control or be controlled, and Manuel (a quietly insidious Harold Torres) embodies that with his own arc of rising from a church-going special forces sergeant nicknamed “Vampire” to aspirational Mexican cartel leader, who uses his professional training as a way to dominate Monterrey with his own army of men who are armed, fast, and loyal. Manuel’s arc takes “ZeroZeroZero” to some very dark, unrelentingly bleak places, but it too works as a study in evil, disconnected from the other two major stories. His story gets bigger and bigger as he starts to gain control, especially as Manuel builds his army with dozens of men training for war, and yet it always comes back to the wavering power within Torres’ stoic presence. Sometimes it’s the haunting look of a stone-cold, sociopathic tyrant, but in a few weaker dramatic beats its the look of someone whose established intricate conscience dissipates with each tactful act of brutality. 

“ZeroZeroZero” takes the moral stance of a Martin Scorsese project, in that it stands back from such various degrees of evil, and lets God sort them out. To become enmeshed with such villains in a high-paced story can be invigorating at first, but it flags when the series proves to share little insight into its focal subject, as if withholding the massive research that clearly inspired the series and the book. Instead, though episode one features Gabriel Byrne’s cheesy voiceover getting didactic about on drug dealing, the show is more reliant on its confident narrative style, of endless betrayals and bids for power, all while trying to give some gritty coolness to the business at hand.  

An expansive and bleak epic like this is rounded out by its filmmaking vigor, of which “ZeroZeroZero” has plenty of. Its action scenes can burst into some genuinely thrilling car chases, shootouts, and shocking kills, all which make some of its hokier visual missteps (like the way it always suddenly goes into dramatic slow motion to switch arcs) easier to forgive. “ZeroZeroZero” prevails in creating a rich world with its interconnected nature; its scope becomes a weapon itself, sobering you up with just how far everything goes. It’s the kind of thriller that makes such a deep impression because it can think big and small at the same time, uniting three gripping individual stories into one massive saga.

Whole season screened for review.

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Culture | Books

Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano - review

Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano, trans Virginia Jewiss (Allen Lane, £20)

In the West Indies, a prime trans-shipment point for cocaine-smuggling is the Jamaican capital of Kingston. Stockpiled along the Kingston wharfs are thousands of “reefers” (refrigerated containers) crammed with frozen meat, fish fingers and other TV dinners. Anti-narcotics security is on the look-out especially for “reefer” shipments from Colombia. No market in the world brings in more revenue than the cocaine market. In return for bribes, Kingston cargo personnel may turn off the container-scanning equipment.

Colombian “white petrol” is destined above all for Britain, a highly prized market. Cocaine fetches three times as much here as in other European countries. Eleven per cent of all our bank notes test positive for cocaine. Typically, proceeds from narco-trafficking are laundered through banking circuits in the City. Transformed into electronic stock, coke capital is almost impossible to trace. “Moving wealth around is hard work,” a City trader tells Roberto Saviano.

Saviano’s investigation into the cokehead brokers, dealers and professional killers who manage the supply and demand of cocaine has an intriguing title. High-quality cocaine is known to pushers as “zero zero zero” because it contains zero levels of baking powder or other impurities. Saviano has been here before. His bestselling exposé of the Neapolitan Mafia, Gomorrah, was turned into a film that put the author’s life at risk. For the past 10 years the 36-year-old Italian journalist has been under police protection. Pointedly, Zero Zero Zero is dedicated to “all my Carabinieri bodyguards”.

The book might lack the locker-room snooping and legwork that made Gomorrah such a visceral masterwork but it remains a tremendously gripping work of reportage. Throughout, Saviano turns an appalled eye on the methods used to grow, stock, transport and protect shipments of angel dust. “In order to understand cocaine,” he writes, “you have to understand Mexico.” Some 90 per cent of the cocaine currently used by Americans is thought to come across the US-Mexican border. Run by computer-literate entrepreneurs, the frontier cartels have spread their tentacles as far afield as oil-rich Houston. Corrupt Mexican policemen are mixed up in the transborder drug killings which, says Saviano, have become increasingly “lurid”. (Bodies are no longer quietly dumped in the desert; they are displayed for all to see, and in some cases decapitated or flayed.)

In a brilliant chapter, Saviano dilates on the Russian Mafia’s infiltration of Wall Street and the financial malpractice attendant on narco-laundering in general. International fraudsters and currency speculators of one stripe or another are often in cahoots with the Calabrian Mafia, who use “mules” to carry cocaine for them. Up to 100 condoms or latex surgical glove fingers filled with cocaine are ingested. Many mules are single mothers in need of money to feed their families. A rupture in just one of the packages can bring an “atrociously painful death”, Saviano reminds us. Not that the drug dons care: the women are expendable.

Saviano’s book, grimly absorbing, views cocaine as a fuel for the entire world economy. It’ll rot your brain — but just look at the money that can be made.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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ZeroZeroZero Review: It's a family thing

Amazon's epic tale of how 5,000 kilos of cocaine affect far more than the buyers, sellers and brokers..

What to Watch Verdict

At the end of the eight hours of ZeroZeroZero you'll have to ask yourself — is this sort of thing *really* going on around us all the time?

A gripping story that's at times hard to watch.

The locations are epic.

So is the acting of everyone on screen.

The Mogwai soundtrack is perfect.

Sometimes the brutality is just a little too much.

Fair warning: You're going to want to set aide the better part of a day or two for ZeroZeroZero . This is one of those series where the story is told so damn well — and the episodes themselves are so masterfully pieced together — that you just have to keep going. No matter how brutal things get. No matter how bleak it may seem. If the characters somehow soldier on, so, too, must you.

The premise of ZeroZeroZero is simple. The head of an Italian Mafia family has been living in exile for years. He wants to get out of his hole in the ground and regain his former stature by getting 5,000 kilograms (that's about five tons ) of cocaine into the system. That sort of buy requires a lot of capital, though, so he gets others to invest in the purchase. Like it was a sports team or something. The coke comes from a pair of brothers in Mexico. The two ends work through a family's shipping company out of New Orleans.

Buyers. Sellers. Brokers. The triad that makes up a major international, wholesale drug operation.

The series is based on the 2016 book by Roberto Saviano and was developed for Italian and French TV, plus Amazon. The result is eight gripping hours spanning three continents, countless deaths, double- and triple-crosses, and an unyielding need to get the deals done.

Watch the fantastic series ZeroZeroZero on Amazon Prime Video.

ZeroZeroZero — it gets its name from the purest form of Italian pasta flour, and slang for pure cocaine — is told from three points of view. There's the Italian crime family in Calabria, in Southern Italy. They're the ones buying the cocaine. There's the Mexican side of things, which is mostly about the specially trained soldiers who are tasked to combat the drug trade — but it's also about the Leyra brothers, who head up the cartel producing the drugs. And there are the Americans — the Lynwood family — who run a shipping business out of New Orleans that facilitates the movement of mass amounts of cocaine.

The brutality is just part of doing business.

Each episode does a masterful job of hooking you, and I didn't even pick up on it until I was a few hours in. We start with the elderly Don Minu (Adriano Chiaramida) meeting with other families and guaranteeing a major shipment of cocaine that will bring everyone a lot of money, and allow him to come out of hiding for the first time in years following a protracted mafia war. Don Minu's grandson, Stefano (Giuseppe De Domenico), is in the mix, but he's in it for revenge — Don Minu years ago killed his own son, Stefano's father, to stop the war. (Though we don't learn that reasoning until later in the series.)

Then we see the Mexican special forces surveilling a meeting between the Leyra brothers and Edward and Emma Lynwood (Andrea Riseborough, who you know from Birdman and Oblivion with Tom Cruise). They're the father and daughter with the shipping business who will make sure the cocaine (which is hidden at the bottom of cans of jalapeño peppers) makes it from Monterey to Gioia Tauro in Southern Italy, three weeks and 6,000 miles away. As the soldiers are about to close in on the kingpins, one of them quietly alerts someone on the Leyra's payroll. The dinner breaks up and the shooting begins. The Leyras and the Lynnwoods escape, but not before Edward Lynwood (Gabrielle Byrne) takes a round in the chest.

That's when time slows down, and we flash back — rewind, really —  to get the whole storm on what's actually happening. It's a simple, subtle trick (and certainly not a unique one), but it's an effective device. You're roped in. Something bad is going to happen, and now you want to see what it is.

The Italian side is the trickiest of the three to follow. First Stefano wants to stop the shipment from ever making it to Italy, ensuring that his grandfather is disgraced once more an his new business partners will turn on him. (And in this world, that can mean waking up to find yourself being eaten alive by starving hogs.) Stefano is strong. He's clever. But maybe a little too clever and not experienced enough. He's working with the rival Curtiga family but quickly finds enemies on all sides. Don Minu is old but not naive. He sees what's coming and forces Stefano back to his family's side — at least until the Curtigas make it plenty clear that either the shipment does not make it to Italy, or Stefano will have to kill Don Minu himself. There's a lot of back-and-forth here, and a few too many characters to follow things easily (plus it's all in Italian). But it's intriguing as hell. Who's going to come out on top? Or at least lose less?

The Mexican side is brutal. No two ways about it. Manuel Contreras (Harold Torres) leads the squad of special forces. They hunt down and kidnap one of the Leyra's men and throw him in a hole for some good, old-fashioned shock-torture. But instead of hearing the screams, Manuel puts in his earbuds and takes in the teachings of an extremely religious podcast. It's maybe not his happy place, but he's doing evil in God's name, and this is how he copes. Ultimately they get the location of the dinner, where things start going down.

The ship full of cocaine leaves for Italy, and Manuel and his team are tasked with boarding it off the coast and stopping the drugs. There he finds Chris Lynnwood (Dane DeHaan), Emma's brother who's been kept out of the family business due to Huntington's Disease, which killed their mother and has secretly started to show in him. Chris stepped up, though, because his father ultimately died from the stress and shock of the attack at dinner, and someone has to make sure the shipment makes it to Italy. And Chris grew up on the large container ships, so he's suited for what's about to happen.

The Mexican commandos fastrope down to the ship, knock out Chris and warn the captain — a longtime friend of the Lynnwoods — that they need to shut down all tracking and disappear as they cross the Atlantic if they want to make it.

One problem with that, though: Stefano paid the captain 1 million Euro to make sure the shipment doesn't make it to Italy. How do you do that? Force an engine fire and abandon ship after knocking out Chris again. Except Chris knows these ships, remember? And he's somehow able to put out the engine fire himself and signal for help, ultimately ending up in Senegal, along with his wrecked ship and $60 million worth of cocaine hidden in the jalapeños. Emma flies in and they make their way across the Sarahah to Casablanca, getting caught up with ISIS along the way.

Meanwhile, Manuel and his crew — after killing their captain and saying to hell with the Mexican Army and getting some serious religious direction — decide to become the Leyras' dedicated paramilitary group. (They don't really give the brothers a choice in the matter.) They're ruthless and brutal. Mass executions to make a point seem routine. They recruit dozens of young men and train them as they were trained. (Maybe not as well, but well enough to be effective.)

But as is the case any number of times in ZeroZeroZero , strength isn't a one-way thing. Who has the upper hand at any given time depends on who's willing to go further. Who's able to see what's coming, or who's able to react the quickest. Who's willing to do whatever they have to do to ensure what needs to be done is done. And that's what's so incredible about the final scene of the series.

Manuel in one chair, a bloodbath left in his wake. Emma sits across from him, sandwiched between two bodies. If she blinked during the meeting — or as she twice walked through the courtyard strewn with bodies of men, women and children — I didn't see it. She simply completely the transaction, prepared for the next one, and went on her way.

The brutality — the death and destruction and transnational fuckery — is just part of doing business. It is the business. And for the three groups in ZeroZeroZero — the buyers, the sellers and the brokers — all that carnage is just a family thing.

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Zero Zero Zero Hardcover – July 2, 2015

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date July 2, 2015
• Dimensions 6.38 x 1.54 x 9.45 inches
• ISBN-10 1846147697
• ISBN-13 978-1846147692
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books Ltd (July 2, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1846147697
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1846147692
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.38 x 1.54 x 9.45 inches
• #5,907 in International Economics (Books)
• #19,577 in Criminology (Books)

About the author

Roberto saviano.

Roberto Saviano (Italian: [roˈbɛrto saˈvjano]; Naples, September 22, 1979) is an Italian journalist, writer and essayist. He is the author of international bestsellers Gomorrah and ZeroZeroZero.

In his writings, his articles, his books and his television programs, he uses literature and investigative reporting to tell of the economic reality of the territory and business of the Camorra and of organized crime more generally.

After the first death threats of 2006 made by the Casalese clan, a cartel of the Camorra, which he denounced in his exposé and in the piazza of Casal di Principe during a demonstration in defense of legality, Saviano was put under a strict security protocol. Since October 13, 2006, he has lived under police protection.

He has collaborated with numerous important Italian and international newspapers. Currently he writes for the Italian publications l'Espresso and la Repubblica. Internationally, he collaborates in the United States with The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek and Time; in Spain with El Pais; in Germany with Die Zeit and Der Spiegel; in Sweden with Expressen; and in the United Kingdom with The Times and The Guardian.

His courageous positions have provoked appeals on his behalf from many important writers and other cultural figures, such as Umberto Eco.

In 2015 he launched his own editorial project, RSO-Roberto Saviano Online.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by piero tasso (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Zero Zero Zero Hardcover – 2 July 2015

International bestselling author Roberto Saviano explores the inner workings of the world of drugs and dirty money - its rules and armies - and the true depth of its reach.

In many countries, 'zero zero' or double zero flour is the finest, best flour on the market. Among narco-traffickers, then, 'zero zero zero' is the nickname for the very purest, highest quality grade of cocaine. From Mexican cartels to Milanese financiers, Guatemalan mercenaries to Ukrainian warlords, Calabrian traffickers to the traders in Wall Street and London who wash the money clean, this is an unforgettable story that goes around the globe and through every level of society to show the extent to which the drug trade affects us all.

Weaving together stories, interviews, wiretaps and his own experience of the criminal underworld, Saviano reveals an international narco-state, which, in the wake of the financial crisis, is now the pillar of our global economy. It is the perfect synthesis of modern capitalism, where everything is for the taking - and all is consumed, ruined and destroyed.

Dark, visceral and terrifying, this is a grand drama of power, blood and money. It is the story of our world.

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Allen Lane
• Publication date 2 July 2015
• Dimensions 16.2 x 3.9 x 24 cm
• ISBN-10 1846147697
• ISBN-13 978-1846147692
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allen Lane (2 July 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1846147697
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1846147692
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.2 x 3.9 x 24 cm
• 2,231 in Organised Crime Biographies

About the author

Roberto saviano.

Roberto Saviano (Italian: [roˈbɛrto saˈvjano]; Naples, September 22, 1979) is an Italian journalist, writer and essayist. He is the author of international bestsellers Gomorrah and ZeroZeroZero.

In his writings, his articles, his books and his television programs, he uses literature and investigative reporting to tell of the economic reality of the territory and business of the Camorra and of organized crime more generally.

After the first death threats of 2006 made by the Casalese clan, a cartel of the Camorra, which he denounced in his exposé and in the piazza of Casal di Principe during a demonstration in defense of legality, Saviano was put under a strict security protocol. Since October 13, 2006, he has lived under police protection.

He has collaborated with numerous important Italian and international newspapers. Currently he writes for the Italian publications l'Espresso and la Repubblica. Internationally, he collaborates in the United States with The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek and Time; in Spain with El Pais; in Germany with Die Zeit and Der Spiegel; in Sweden with Expressen; and in the United Kingdom with The Times and The Guardian.

His courageous positions have provoked appeals on his behalf from many important writers and other cultural figures, such as Umberto Eco.

In 2015 he launched his own editorial project, RSO-Roberto Saviano Online.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by piero tasso (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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ZeroZeroZero review – Gomorrah writer offers a bleak cartel saga

This drug trafficking drama based on the work of Roberto Saviano is a slick affair, but a grim message – and a nihilistic streak – are never far from the surface

W ho’d be a drug dealer, eh? From The Wire to Narcos , via Breaking Bad and Traffic (or the 1989 British miniseries Traffik, on which it was based, if your memory extends that far), it always looks exhausting. So stressful. And, y’know, periodically fatal.

This is particularly the case, perhaps, when you are at the top of the food chain, like the fellows organising the multimillion-dollar cocaine deal in ZeroZeroZero (Sky Atlantic). The eight-part limited series – one with final scenes that beg for a sequel – is based on a book by the Gomorrah writer Robert Saviano and follows the international travels of 5,000kg of drugs, as well as the travails of those whose lives and livelihoods depend on their successful delivery.

It is part mafia saga, part crime thriller and part family drama. In the Calabrian mountains, Don Minu La Piana (Adriano Chiaramida), the teetering head of the organised crime syndicate the ’Ndrangheta , emerges from a bunker to gather potential buyers and organise a spectacular deal that – if successful – will restore his standing among them all. By the end of the first episode, it is clear that things are not going to go smoothly and that most of what you would expect from a mafia saga will come into play, from treacherous relatives to hungry, undiscerning pigs.

Meanwhile, in Monterrey, Mexico, the cartel amasses the goods for sale, while Manuel Contreras (Harold Torres), a special forces sergeant and devout Catholic, decides that the best way to serve God is to put together a rogue unit and go to war against local corruption, however many bodies are eviscerated in the process.

In the US, the Lynwoods – patriarch Edward, chip-off-the-old-block daughter Emma and sheltered son Chris (Gabriel Byrne, Andrea Riseborough and Dane DeHaan respectively), who is beginning to show signs of the Huntingdon’s disease that killed his mother – own a shipping firm that depends on the huge shipment to cure their financial woes and keep the family business – uh – afloat. They are $31m in the hole as they wait for the drugs to start moving out of Mexico and the first payment to arrive. It is like a nightmarish house-buying experience.

Unbeknown to the Lynwoods, Don Minu’s grandson Stefano (Giuseppe De Domenico) is not the devoted scion he appears to be. In what I consider to be an unlikely move, even given the Italian love of dramatic gesture, he has burned the money collected for the purchase. He vows that the next body to be tipped into the pigsty will be his grandfather’s, kicking off a welter of local and global cat-and-mouse, double-crossing, tip-offs, treacheries, torture and killings, albeit at a surprisingly sedate – even languorous – pace.

The grim unfoldings are humanised somewhat by the Lynwoods – especially by the relationship between Emma and Chris as they negotiate the hurdles presented by his illness and their father’s wish that she protect her brother from all things. It is also humanised by Manuel, although you have to bring a certain amount of willingness to read suffering on his compromised moral compass, as the bloodshed occasionally makes it hard to see.

As Miss Jean Brodie might say, for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like. It is gorgeous to look at; it is brutal enough for a trafficking tale; and there is plenty going on. But it is methadone to the heroin of, say, Narcos. It lacks the emotional depth of Netflix’s hit, despite almost certainly being designed to compete with it. The streak of nihilism that runs through it militates against you caring much what happens to any of the groups or individuals involved.

And you do need to care. You don’t need to like the characters – although one or two you could root for in some respect wouldn’t go amiss – but you need to be able to see them in the round. Most of them ape the title of the show, amounting to little more than ciphers. Maybe it is a way of suggesting the futility of the fight against drugs and trafficking – as Edward complacently assures the other dealers and brokers round the table at a meeting in Mexico, their business is what keeps the world economy afloat and therefore will never be meaningfully dismantled. But it tips the experience of watching into bleakness. Fictional narratives need resolution; any promised here is undercut by the suggestion that nothing ever really changes.

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'ZeroZeroZero' Review: Violent Drug Drama Is Amazon's Answer to 'Narcos'

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Cocaine is one hell of a drug. It's also one hell of a business, and as Amazon's violent new drug drama ZeroZeroZero dramatizes, it "keeps the world's economy afloat." This gritty international tale is clearly Amazon's answer to Netflix's Narcos , albeit a temporary one, given that it's billed as a limited series. The streamer would be wise to take a page out of its competitor's playbook and pivot to the equivalent of Narcos: Mexico , because these eight episodes would be a promising start for an ongoing franchise.

ZeroZeroZero  is based on the book by Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano , and bounces between Italy, Mexico and New Orleans as we follow a large shipment of cocaine. Dane DeHaan and Andrea Riseborough star as Chris and Emma Lynwood, the adult children of Edward Lynwood ( Gabriel Byrne ), a well respected middle man who brokers drug deals between sellers and buyers.

When the Lynwood family business and its assets are threatened, the siblings find themselves with new responsibilities, including nurturing an all-important relationship with Don Minu ( Adriano Chiaramida ), who leads a criminal syndicate in Italy from a bunker tucked away in the mountains of Calabria. With Don Minu in hiding, his grandson Stefano ( Giuseppe De Domenico ) sees an opportunity to seize control. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Special Forces leader Manuel Contreras ( Harold Torres ) tires of taking orders, and decides to make his own play for power, with a growing army behind him.

Right off the bat, it's my duty to warn you that this show is exceptionally violent. It's the kind of show where someone gets shot in the head, and then two people pick up the body, and you can see the blood and brains falling out of the wound. And yet, the direction is basically flawless, whether it's Stefano Sollima ( Sicario: Day of the Soldado ), Janus Metz ( True Detective ) or Pablo Trapero ( The Clan ) behind the camera, as they all do fantastic work. I don't think ZeroZeroZero has the same emotional depth as Narcos , but from a visual standpoint, I'll give it the edge.

As far as the performances go, DeHaan, Riseborough and Byrne are all solid, and though they're the only recognizable actors in the cast, that actually works in the show's favor. In fact, the series standout is Torres, who gives a breakout performance as Contreras. Though his moral compass has been compromised, Contreras represents the heart and soul of the series for me, as well as its most three-dimensional character.

Torres rises to the occasion here, by equal turns terrifying and sensitive, and I couldn't take my eyes off him. Even though Contreras is one of the show's most cold-blooded characters, Torres imbues him with a certain vulnerability that helps us see him as more than just a monster. His eyes burn with intensity, though he rarely lets his guard down enough to show emotion in front of his men. His humanity is seen in brief glimpses, particularly in his dealings with the pregnant wife of a fallen comrade. Beyond that, he shows no mercy.

If there's anything holding this series back in the slightest, it's the scenes with the Lynwood siblings, as the brokers simply aren't as interesting in this world as the buyers or sellers. The shipment of cocaine that they are overseeing is obviously a big deal for them, but the stakes for them never felt like life or death to me in the way that they do when the series moves to Mexico or Italy. The later episodes try to beef up Chris' character by putting more emphasis on the Huntington's disease that he knows will eventually kill him, and while that does give DeHaan a bit more to play as an actor, it still doesn't make Chris especially interesting. He'll always be seen as the runt of the litter, eager to prove himself to his father, who would prefer to keep him away from the family business, which Chris doesn't always have the stomach for -- certainly not like his sister, who has ice running through her veins that helps her navigate her way in this cutthroat world. Again, Riseborough and DeHaan are both good, but their characters just didn't feel as fresh as others. I feel like I've seen their sibling dynamic before.

The secret ingredient in this cauldron of chaos is the original score by Mogwai. I can't understate how crucial Mogwai's music is to the success of this show. They have contributed some awesome instrumental tracks to plenty of Hollywood movies, from Michael Mann 's Miami Vice to the Steve Carell - Timothee Chalamet drama Beautiful Boy , but never before has their instrumentation served as the backbone of a major TV series, and it's quite effective in communicating the intensity of ZeroZeroZero . Even the credits feel epic as the main theme builds to a crescendo before our journey continues.

ZeroZeroZero is a series about power, the lengths we'll go to get it, and what we're willing to do to keep it. Don Minu and Manuel each grapple with this, though sometimes it's the middle man left holding the bag to suffer the greatest consequences. The final minute of the series is stunning. The camera follows a single cast member out of mansion littered with dead bodies. and that character has to act completely unfazed, whether or not they actually are. Those dead people are just the cost of doing business Everyone has their price. The question you have to ask yourself is, 'what's yours?'

Rating: ★★★★

ZeroZeroZero is now streaming on Amazon Prime.

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ZeroZeroZero

A cocaine shipment makes its way to Europe, starting from the moment a powerful cartel of Italian criminals decides to buy it, to its journeys through Mexico, to its shipment across the Atla... Read all A cocaine shipment makes its way to Europe, starting from the moment a powerful cartel of Italian criminals decides to buy it, to its journeys through Mexico, to its shipment across the Atlantic Ocean. A cocaine shipment makes its way to Europe, starting from the moment a powerful cartel of Italian criminals decides to buy it, to its journeys through Mexico, to its shipment across the Atlantic Ocean.

• Leonardo Fasoli
• Mauricio Katz
• Stefano Sollima
• Andrea Riseborough
• Dane DeHaan
• Giuseppe De Domenico
• 408 User reviews
• 29 Critic reviews
• 1 win & 2 nominations

• Emma Lynwood

• Chris Lynwood

• Stefano La Piana

• Manuel Contreras

• Italo Curtiga

• Enrique Leyra

• Don Damiano 'Minu' La Piana

• Lucia La Piana …

• Jacinto Leyra
• Domenico La Piana

• Maria Leyra …
• Italo's driver
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia The title ZeroZeroZero is a play on the Italian grading system for flour, which is rated, 2, 1, 0 or 00 depending on how refined it is (double zero being the highest grade). ZeroZeroZero, or triple Zero, here means pure cocaine.
• Soundtracks Amor Traicionado Written by Immanuel Miralda Performed by Amantes del Futuro and Sofía Espinosa

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Zero Zero Zero is proof that when it comes to crime, Italians know best

By Thomas Barrie

All the best families in fiction want to kill each other. From the Lannisters to the Roys to the Corleones, all are murderous, deeply compelling and dysfunctional clans. Zero Zero Zero , Sky Atlantic’s new Italian mafia/Mexican cartel crossover series based on the novel by Roberto Saviano, knows this intimately and much of its first episode, “The Shipment”, is spent setting up an internecine conflict that looks like it should have an explosive effect on the remaining seven hours of the series. It’s a classic move because, to paraphrase Leo Tolstoy: “All happy crime families are alike, but every unhappy crime family is unhappy in its own way.”

The episode is divided, roughly, into three parts and the first is titled “The Buyers”. Set in rustic Calabria, the cold open sees an old 'Ndrangheta crime lord, Don Minu, emerge from an underground bunker into the hills of southern Italy amid a herd of goats. He heads down into the woods near town to meet his loyal grandson Don Stefano, a young mafioso with the slicked looks and Mediterranean charm of an overhyped Premier League signing. Don Minu has that age-old problem faced by any veteran crime boss: a lack of respect among his underlings. “Until yesterday,” he tells Stefano, “everyone would shit their pants at the sight of me.” To win back the support of his clan, Don Minu has put in a huge order of cocaine from the Mexican drug cartels: some 5,000 kilos worth €900 million, enough to make them all rich. 

But not everybody is happy with the arrangement. After agreeing to help his grandfather, Stefano intercepts the cash intended to pay for the coke and burns it, feeding the courier’s corpse to a huge pig (if this sounds like a spoiler, bear in mind it takes place barely 15 minutes into the series). “Keep her on a diet,” he tells the pig farmer. He has his own plans for Don Minu.

In part two, “The Sellers”, we jump to Monterrey, Mexico, where a squadron of police are tracking the Leyra brothers, cartel bosses who are processing the cocaine order for the Italians. There’s more action here, as the police – who are almost as corrupt as the cartel, driving out to remote locations to torture suspects – follow a mid-level associate to try to catch the Leyras themselves. Despite a couple of confusing plot elements (when all the cops are wearing skull bandannas over their faces, it can be difficult to tell them apart), the section makes up for it with a couple of great chase scenes. And eventually, the Leyras are cornered…

If you told me that was that for the hour, I’d have believed you – provided I wasn’t expecting Andrea Riseborough, Gabriel Byrne and Dane DeHaan to turn up at any point. Because although Riseborough, Byrne and DeHaan are the big British, Irish and American names in Zero Zero Zero , it’s not until 40 minutes in that any of them appears on screen (although Byrne gets a few lines of voiceover and a single no-context shot early on). They are the Lynwoods – patriarch Edward and his adult children, Emma and Chris, or “The Dealmakers” who give part three its title – and they have a fleet of cocaine-running ships based out of New Orleans. And so, at last, the link is established between the ‘Ndrangheta and the cartel. The Lynwoods’ position, as the deliverymen stuck between a violent Italian crime family and a violent Mexican one, is unenviable, and they’re already €31m in the hole after the Italians’ payment has failed to materialise courtesy of Stefano. Tensions rise, Emma and Edward clash, and you wonder whether Stefano’s feed-Don-Minu-to-the-pigs plan might not be the only act of patricide in Zero Zero Zero .

Many international series with such big Anglosphere stars (who have a raft of award nominations between them) would be in a hurry to shove them on-screen as quickly and often as possible. But instead, and admirably, Zero Zero Zero is happy to treat them as just another three members of the cast and let Saviano’s own understanding of the real-life world of the Italian mafia shine through on its own terms. (Saviano is not a writer on the show, but he is credited as an executive producer.)

Don Minu’s bunker, for example, isn’t just a writer’s flourish – it’s a reference to the hundreds of real-life bunkers dug throughout Calabria for ‘Ndrangheta bosses over the last 30 years. Far from being Marlon Brando types, with rings to kiss and red roses in the lapels of their tuxedos, these elderly men hide in tiny concrete rooms and give orders through ancient mobile phones or in person. And yet they could still happily chop your head off with a combat knife if you crossed them.

By Andrew Nagy

By Lucy Ford

By Daisy Jones

Watching the Italian section of Zero Zero Zero , you feel like this is really what the mafia is like: unassuming, hidden in plain sight, but full of latent menace. Italians are good at crime, nice suits, cured meats and tearfully thanking their mothers when they win the World Cup – and Zero Zero Zero makes sure to include three of these things in its first 20 minutes. Until someone pulls out a gun, Calabria looks like a decent enough place to go on holiday, if a little shabby. 

Similarly, the Mexico sequences benefit from having director Stefano Sollima at the helm. Sollima directed the underappreciated cartel thriller Sicario 2: Soldado and has worked with Saviano material before, on the Gomorrah TV series and it’s not hard to tell that he’s in his element with Zero Zero Zero , thriving amid the dusty half-built housing estates and villas on the outskirts of town. He dwells on the human cost of crime, with one scene involving a little girl hit by a bullet particularly difficult to watch.

What made Gomorrah , the film, so striking when it came out in 2008 was just how intensely dirty and mundane much of organised crime is. Far removed from the London townhouses of its recent peers Gangs Of London and McMafia and the Mediterranean luxury of The Night Manager , the first episode of Zero Zero Zero starts off sordid and only promises to get more so, wolfishly reminding us that the glamorous and the grimy often go hand in hand.

Zero Zero Zero is on NOW TV and Sky Atlantic tonight at 9pm.

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‘Zero Zero Zero’ by Roberto Saviano

With his extraordinary new book about the international cocaine trade, Roberto Saviano once again rewrites the true-crime genre. Like “Gomorrah,” his blistering 2006 exposé of the Camorra, the Naples crime syndicate, “Zero Zero Zero” stretches the boundaries of investigative journalism with personal meditation and existential inquiry.

Saviano begins, in chapters chronicling the evolution of the Mexican drug cartels, by forcing us to confront human behavior of almost unimaginable viciousness and brutality. He matter-of-factly describes, in stomach-turning detail, murders and tortures inflicted on rivals, on government officials who decline to be bribed, and on innocent bystanders unlucky enough to be in the wrong place with groups like Los Zetas and La Familia as they engage in turf battles that reduce entire regions to war zones. Although this litany of horrors is punctuated by arrests, Saviano notes that cartel leaders often operate with impunity from jail.

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That point was underscored by the recent escape of the Sinaloa cartel’s top dog, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, from Mexico’s highest-security prison through a mile-long tunnel equipped with lighting and ventilation — not something he dug out with a teaspoon, or without substantial outside (and probably inside) assistance.

Anyone tempted to smugly view Mexico as a failed state, in need of US assistance to be cleaned up the way Colombia was, gets a reality check when Saviano moves on to Colombia, depicting the (relative) decline of its cartels as a case study in “the full adaptive capacity of a system that has one fixed constant: white powder.” Colombia still produces 60 percent of the world’s cocaine, and if the country is less dangerous than it was 20 years ago, that’s partly because Mexico became more so as the center of cocaine power shifted north.

Saviano works in an impressionistic style that requires attentiveness and patience. The periodic interludes titled “Coke #1,” “Coke #2,” etc. are initially irritating: Do we really need a four-page recitation of the different kinds of people who use cocaine? Seven pages listing the drug’s various nicknames? By the time we get to “Coke #6” (10 pages of cocaine busts), his intent is clear: He wants to shatter the complacency of those who think cocaine is irrelevant to their law-abiding lives by showing them that the drug touches every life.

We grasp cocaine’s global significance as Saviano follows it across oceans to scrutinize its Old World traffickers. The Calabrian ’ndrangheta, the Russian Mafia, and the Nigerian underworld all thrive, like the Latin Americans, in fragile states with tottering institutions and rampant corruption, where criminal organizations have the advantage of operating by clear-cut rules and imposing a twisted sort of order. But they could not operate successfully without the complicity of legal institutions in prosperous industrial nations.

In the past five years, the US bank Wachovia and HBUS, the US subsidiary of international banking giant HSBC, admitted to accepting billions of dollars in suspicious transfers from Mexico, in effect laundering drug money; they paid fines that were derisory in comparison with the banks’ earnings.

Banks have historically been implicated in laundering money for all sorts of illegal enterprises, but Saviano sees a sinister escalation in the wake of the liquidity crisis caused by the 2008 economic meltdown. In December 2009, he reports, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that criminal organizations’ cash was the only thing that kept some banks from failing.

“[T]he problem is no longer far away, in wretched countries,” he writes. “The centers of world financial power have stayed afloat thanks to cocaine money.”

Saviano agonizes over his obsession with organized crime in passages that sometimes seem self-indulgent, until you realize that he’s agonizing over whether writing can make a difference. “To know is the first step toward change,” he asserts. But his accounts of journalists and filmmakers who have been killed for documenting the drug cartels’ activities, and the indifferent response of authorities to their deaths, demonstrate how powerful the forces arrayed against change are. And for someone who’s been living under police protection since “Gomorrah” was first published nine years ago, the second step must seem a long time coming.

ZERO ZERO ZERO

By Roberto Saviano

Translated, from the Italian, by Virginia Jewiss

Penguin Press, 464 pp., illustrated, $29.95

Wendy Smith, a contributing editor at The American Scholar and Publishers Weekly, reviews books for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Daily Beast.

ZeroZeroZero Ending, Explained

Based on the book of the same name by Roberto Saviano, ‘ ZeroZeroZero ’ follows different sets of characters in three parts of the world, tracing their personal and professional affiliations and how their actions affect the lives of each other. The show follows a timeline that takes us back and forth to twist the story into shocking revelations. The final episode of the series does something similar, and here we break down what it means for the characters. If you haven’t yet caught up with the show, head over to Amazon Prime . SPOILERS AHEAD

Plot Summary

It begins with a shipment that is to leave Mexico for Italy. Three parties are involved in the transaction. The Mexicans are the suppliers, the Italians are the buyers, and the Americans are the link between them. In Mexico, a corrupt soldier keeps the drug cartels safe. In Italy, Stefano brews a plot against his own grandfather, the repercussions of which are felt by the Lynwood family who bears the responsibility to get the shipment across the continent.

Manuel in Mexico

Manuel Contreras’s character had developed as a wild card in the world on whose side-lines he had been for so long. While serving in the Mexican Army, he had been on a payroll of the Leyra brothers and was so dedicated to their end that he jeopardised himself as well as his men after saving the shipment that was headed for Italy. It had become clear early on that he believed in his own survival. Despite his belief in God and suffering a minor nudging for his guilty conscience, he had always been the guy who was ready to do whatever it takes.

He killed Diego to save himself when his superior suspected a mole, and then he killed the superior as well when they attacked the ship. When it became clear that there is no turning back now, he took his talents to Leyra and helped them turn entire Monterrey into their territory.

Manuel was always a sharp person, but he was never greedy. He always knew his place and acted as he been paid, rather than asked, to. When fate took a turn, he jumped on the opportunity, which is what finally leads him to the event that we had seen coming a couple of episodes into the show. After the random violence between the Firm and the Leyras, he attacks them and easily kills them all.

Before this, Chiquitita gives birth to a girl, and Manuel comes clean to her about his involvement in Diego’s death. He promises to provide for them for the rest of his life but cannot stay with them for their own safety. At Leyra’s, he kills everyone, but before that, he comes to know about the 32 million that are waiting to be delivered by Emma.

Stefano’s End

They arrive at Casablanca to intercept the ship before it leaves for Italy, but by then, Emma has already left to see it off, and they get hold of Chris. He takes them on a wild goose chase. This angers Stefano and he kills Chris. Now, he has only one thing left to do, if he wants his family to survive. He has to kill Don Minu. A meeting is set up between them, but once he arrives at his grandfather’s place, he finds Emma waiting for him there.

Emma and the Shipment

After her father’s sudden death, Emma tried to keep it all together as best as she could. She got Chris into the business, for his own good. But things started going wrong, and she and Chris had to flee a couple of countries with bullets in their pursuit. In the end, she succeeds in keeping her end of the business and safely gets the cargo to Casablanca, from where it sails to Italy.

While she is away, making sure everything goes fine at the port, her brother is captured by Curtiga and then killed by Stefano. To get her revenge, she flies to Italy where she makes an offer to Don Minu. If he kills Stefano, she will tell him exactly where the shipment is. Minu, who always puts business above everything else, accepts and kills Stefano. Emma gets her revenge and she departs for Mexico to close the deal with Leyra.

After killing Stefano and getting the shipment from Emma, Don Minu kills Curtega and saves Stefano’s wife and child. With the backstabbers and conspirators gone, business flourishes once again. Moreover, he has also established goodwill with Emma, which he also had with her father. Emma arrives in Mexico to discover the bloodbath at Leyra’s place. She is taken to Manuel, who declares himself as the new boss. She gives him the money she owed to Leyra and continues with the business.

A next shipment headed for Russia is demanded by her, and Manuel agrees to deliver. A new business partnership is forged. Manuel takes some time to ponder over his newfound power and business empire, with the entire city under his thumb, and Emma walks away with a smile on her face.

Read More: Is ZeroZeroZero is Based on a True Story?

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Season 1 – ZeroZeroZero

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An addictive thriller whose greatest weakness is that it is at times too withholding, ZeroZeroZero will stick with you long after the credits roll.

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ZeroZeroZero review: This dark cocaine opera is brilliant, bleak escapism for long February nights

Bold adaptation starring dane dehaan contains a little of the godfather, a splash of sicario and a dash of succession: a tasty recipe, article bookmarked.

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The brash, expensive, enormous eight-part cocaine crime drama ZeroZeroZero ( Sky Atlantic ) arrives on British screens a year after it appeared in the US and Italy, and almost 18 months after its debut at the Venice film festival. It doesn’t hide its ambitions under a bushel. Based on Roberto Saviano ’s novel of the same name, this is a series with grand pretensions. It explores the global drug trade by focusing on the suppliers in Mexico, the buyers in Italy, and the middlemen who operate out of New Orleans. Normally this business is a smooth multibillion-pound engine of hedonism, profit and death, but what happens when something goes wrong?

In the opening episode alone, there are more set pieces than in many blockbusters: I counted a mafia showdown in the woods, three glamorous locations, hundreds of extras, pigs eating a corpse, two abductions, two gun fights, a car chase, a torture scene, slow-motion bullet-casings, banknotes being burnt in an oil drum and a man praying to Jesus over the body of a dead schoolgirl. It’s about as subtle as an elephant loading a dishwasher.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t enjoyable. At its best, ZeroZeroZero is three polished dramas rolled into one. The Calabrian mafia – the ’Ndrangheta – are engaged in a succession tussle. To shore up his position with the local commanders, Don Minu (Adriano Chiaramida) orders five tons of cocaine, but his grandson Stefano (Giuseppe De Domenico) sees an opportunity to overthrow the old man. The turbulence has knock-on effects for the suppliers in Mexico, who are already embroiled in a classic narco plot that revolves around Manuel Contreras (Harold Torres) as a turncoat commando.

Caught between them is the American Lynwood family, who use their international shipping business to move the gear between continents. Patriarch Edward (Gabriel Byrne) is grooming his daughter Emma (Andrea Riseborough) to take over the company, believing his son Chris (Dane DeHaan), who has Huntingdon’s disease, to be unfit. A little of The Godfather , a splash of Sicario , a dash of Succession : a tasty recipe.

Each of the strands has different strengths, but there’s enough material in each to sustain a lesser series. The director, Stefano Sollima , previously worked on the excellent adaptation of Saviano’s novel Gomorrah . He creates a similar sense of kinetic energy here, using a cinematic visual aesthetic and a pulsing, Nine Inch Nails-esque soundtrack by Mogwai to connect the different locations, and freely showboating with the directorial flourishes.

On the whole, the three stories are treated as discrete units, only combining for the odd disastrous encounter, which means the web of relations between the characters is not as involved as it would be if they were all in one place. Byrne, Riseborough and DeHaan do sterling work in making Lynwoods seem like a realistic family unit, considering they are the linchpins of a global drug smuggling route. It’s a credit to the writing and performances that ZeroZeroZero doesn't collapse under its zeal for bombast. Instead, this is a dark, exuberant cocaine opera, bleak escapism for long February nights.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Ruth Ware ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2023

Lots of adrenaline-driven action, a departure from Ware’s usual wire-taut mysteries.

When a security expert is murdered, his wife will stop at nothing to find the killer—even as she becomes suspect No. 1.

Jacintha “Jack” Cross is a “penetration tester”: She’s the boots-on-the-ground person for testing out security systems, while her husband, Gabe, does the same for cybersecurity. Leaving a job one night, Jack is picked up by the police—an occupational hazard—and when she returns home, she finds Gabe’s body, throat slit. In shock, Jack reports the murder, talks to the police again, and goes to stay with her older sister, Helena Wick, for a day. When she’s asked to return to the station for a few more questions, Jack quickly realizes that she’s under suspicion—and so she goes on the run. With the help of her sister and Cole Garrick, Gabe’s oldest friend, she’s able to elude capture and begin her own investigation, determined to find her husband’s killer. Apparently, Gabe had found a “zero-day exploit,” a backdoor vulnerability, in a popular app, one that could be worth a lot of money to governments and bad actors. Ware has often highlighted technology as a malignant, uncontrollable force in her novels, and it’s frequently at odds with her luxurious, somewhat timeless settings. But in this novel, tech is front and center. Despite the contemporary trappings, though, the story is still a familiar one: It's The Fugitive if the main characters were women. There's plenty of excitement—chases, break-ins, shady bitcoin deals, an impending medical emergency—but the pool of characters is too small to leave much suspense about the mystery of Gabe’s death. Jack is a strong and fearless heroine, and Ware is always a master of setting and atmosphere, but the great reveal makes one wonder: Was it all worth it? Or more accurately, couldn’t Jack have figured this out much faster? Did it all have to come down to the poetic moment when she has nothing left?

Pub Date: June 20, 2023

ISBN: 9781982155292

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Ruth Ware

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by Nora Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2024

A touching story of love and grief ends in an epic battle of good versus evil.

Roberts’ latest may move you to tears, or joy, or dread, or all three.

Every summer, John and Cora Fox visit Cora’s mother, Lucy Lannigan, in Redbud Hollow, Kentucky, leaving their children, 12-year-old Thea and 10-year-old Rem, for a two-week taste of heaven. The children love Grammie Lucy far more than John’s snooty family, which looks down on Cora. Lucy, a healer with deep Appalachian roots, loves animals, cooks the best meals, plays musical instruments, and makes soap and candles for her thriving business. Thea—who’s inherited the psychic abilities passed down through the women of Lucy’s family—has vivid magical dreams, one of which becomes a living nightmare when a psychopath robs and murders John and Cora as Thea watches helplessly. Thea’s description of the killer and her ability to see him in real time help the skeptical police catch Ray Riggs, who goes to prison for life. Although Thea and Rem go on to have a wonderful childhood with Grammie, Thea constantly wages a mental battle with Riggs, who tries to use his own psychic abilities to get into her mind. Over the years, Thea uses her imagination to become a game designer while the more business-minded Rem helps manage her career. Thea eventually builds a house near Lucy, where a newly arrived neighbor is her teen crush, singer-songwriter Tyler Brennan. Tyler has his own issues and is protective of his young son but slowly builds a loving relationship with Thea, whose silence about her abilities leads to a devastating misunderstanding. At first Thea tries to keep Riggs locked out of her mind. As her powers grow, she torments him. Finally, she realizes that she must win this battle and destroy him if she’s ever to have peace.

Pub Date: May 21, 2024

ISBN: 9781250289698

Page Count: 432

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024

ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Nora Roberts

IndieBound Bestseller

THE SILENT PATIENT

by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.

"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

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by Alex Michaelides

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‘zerozerozero’: tv review.

Amazon's new look at the international drug trade is familiar stuff, but globe-trotting cinematography and performances by Andrea Riseborough and Dane DeHaan help 'ZeroZeroZero' stand out.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

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Thanks to the relative decline in the legal and medical procedural, I lack the TV-earned confidence that I could litigate a case or perform surgery. After years of watching shows like Narcos , Breaking Bad and The Wire (plus movies like Traffic ), however, I’m utterly convinced that I could operate at least a small drug empire.

At this point, few businesses have been depicted as often with the multitiered nuance that showrunners have dedicated to the ins and outs of the narcotics field, which for some reason has lent itself better than most to a top-down analysis of production, distribution and consumption.

Air date: Mar 06, 2020

That’s probably why Amazon’s new drama ZeroZeroZero rarely feels all that revolutionary even if its approach — multiple storylines across several continents with an ensemble of dozens of characters speaking many languages — would surely be innovative if the corporate focus were on, say, grapes. Genre familiarity may make ZeroZeroZero less fresh, but it remains quite watchable, if you can ignore its vaguely nihilistic streak, thanks to a good cast, confident direction and cinematography that’s really quite stunning at times.

Adapted by Stefano Sollima, Leonardo Fasoli and Mauricio Katz from the book by Robert Saviano, ZeroZeroZero has its focus particularly on the drug trade between Mexico and the Italian organized crime syndicate known as ‘Ndrangheta. Adriano Chiaramida plays Don Minu, an aging ‘Ndrangheta boss whose ability to maintain his power may hinge on a hefty shipment of cocaine arriving from Mexico. Producing conflict on that side of the equation is Manuel (Harold Torres), a cold-eyed soldier in the Mexican army with plans to use military precision and vicious tactics to upend the corrupt local infrastructure.

Uniting the two groups are the brokers, New Orleans-based shipping family the Lynwoods, led by business-first patriarch Edward (Gabriel Byrne) and chip-off-the-old-block daughter Emma ( Andrea Riseborough ), with sheltered son Chris ( Dane DeHaan ) getting unexpectedly pushed into the fray.

Over eight episodes, directed by Sollima, Janus Metz and Pablo Trapero, the three groups engage in a high-body-count war that travels from New Orleans to Monterrey to Calabria to Casablanca and features enough double-crossing that I probably stopped caring around halfway through.

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Narratively, ZeroZeroZero borders on mechanical. Each episode has to weave together the three storylines, rarely with grace or clear continuity, and each episode contains a point where everything goes into slow-motion briefly and queues up a flashback, sometimes adding illumination and occasionally just playing like a gimmick.

It doesn’t help, though it may be intentional, that particularly on the Italian and Mexican sides of the story, the characters are fairly mechanical as well. I can accept that some of that is probably a “cogs in the machine” approach, but other than the few primary figures — Don Minu, his wormy grandson Stefano (Giuseppe De Domenico) and Manuel — the supporting characters rarely have names and they definitely don’t have personality traits and even those main characters are limited. Manuel has a devotion to a revivalist church, which barely pays off, and otherwise the character might as well be a robot. Stefano has a wife and son whose names might as well be “Woman Prop” and “Child Prop.” Don Minu gets tremendous mileage from Chiaramida’s consummate gravitas, but I couldn’t tell you a single detail about the character.

They’re all prepared to kill each other at a moment’s notice and I guess the inference is that if these people wipe each other off the map collectively, another identical group of factotums would take their place, which makes it hard to care one way or the other and renders the series’ frequent bloodshed affectless. I lost track of whether ZeroZeroZero was getting off on the hollow violence — there’s a whole lot of torture and maiming here — or is about people who get off on hollow violence.

By default, your sympathies go to the Lynwoods, which isn’t in any way deserved. Edward cares mostly about money and has raised Emma to follow in his footsteps. Riseborough gives a performance of Swinton-esque inscrutability and upending of gender roles, peaking in the eventful finale. Because he may be the series’ only character with a clear secondary motivation that isn’t financial — he has the genetic markers for Huntington’s disease and he’s begun to show symptoms — Chris is almost the hero here and DeHaan’s performance is intense and wired in a way nothing around him can match. The Lynwoods are still complicit and parasitic and the nods to make you care about them are manipulative.

Much of this, I know, sounds negative. It’s still easy to get caught up in the churn of this elaborate drug deal, especially when each episode is sparked by well-executed car chases and shootouts that punctuate what is otherwise a strangely contemplative tone (given that not a single one of the characters is introspective enough for contemplation).

Maybe it’s here that the directors and cinematographers Paolo Carnera and Romain Lacourbas are the ones doing the contemplating? ZeroZeroZero was shot on location through Italy, Mexico, Senegal and Morocco and each episode is one breathtaking shot after another, whether the natural beauty of the Calabrian coast or the African desert or the industrial scale of a vast shipping yard or container-stacked freighter. And it does it all without the somewhat rudimentary use of photographic filters that Traffic and Narcos have made into just another convention.

The distinctive cinematography is aided by the score from Mogwai that’s unexpectedly dreamy in a world that’s more of a nightmare. This is a story in which every principal in the drug trade has apparently used their ill-gotten gains to purchase a residence on an incline, overlooking the civilians they obviously believe themselves to be above. The actual end-users are entirely absent in ZeroZeroZero , because as disposable as those in power might be, the consumers are invisible to them.

Even if ZeroZeroZero is a variation on a story you’ve probably seen ad nauseam and I wish it did just a bit more to differentiate itself, at least it doesn’t look like the previous versions — and if you’re doing research to start your own foray into the powder racket, that can’t hurt.

Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Dane DeHaan, Gabriel Byrne, Giuseppe De Domenico, Adriano Chiaramida, Harold Torres

Creators: Stefano Sollima, Leonardo Fasoli and Mauricio Katz, from the book by Robert Saviano

Premieres Friday, March 6 on Amazon Prime Video.

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Ground zero, common sense media reviewers.

Intense, compelling novel about 9/11 and its aftermath.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

The Author's Note at the back of the book offers b

Shows the power of working together to overcome en

Both Brandon and Reshmina show remarkable courage,

On 9/11, people in the Twin Towers are burned aliv

A few instances of characters using "hell," "crap,

Mentions of stores like J. Crew and Hallmark and c

The story mentions that Afghan farmers grow poppie

Parents need to know that Ground Zero , by Alan Gratz ( Refugee ), is told in alternating chapters by 9-year-old American Brandon Cruz and 11-year-old Reshmina, who lives in rural Afghanistan. Brandon's story begins on the morning of September 11, 2000. He's come to work with his father, who's a kitchen…

Educational Value

The Author's Note at the back of the book offers brief informative sections on The World Trade Center, The Attacks, The Terrorists, The War in Afghanistan, and Today (life in Afghanistan, how life in the U.S. has changed since 9/11, and the rebuilding of the World Trade Center).

Positive Messages

Shows the power of working together to overcome enormous challenges. On 9/11, people in the World Trade Center found themselves teaming up with and depending upon not just their coworkers, but complete strangers as they tried to make their way out of the Twin Towers.

Positive Role Models

Both Brandon and Reshmina show remarkable courage, putting themselves in danger to help others.

Violence & Scariness

On 9/11, people in the Twin Towers are burned alive, die in falling elevators, jump from high floors, and are killed by the collapse of the buildings. In Afghanistan, characters remember how the Taliban massacred families, burned down schools, sold girls into slavery, and held public executions. An Afghan family has family members killed in attacks by both the Taliban and American forces. A battle between the Taliban and American soldiers is vividly described with soldiers being killed and wounded, a helicopter being shot down, and rocket attacks on soldiers and civilians.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

A few instances of characters using "hell," "crap," and "damn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Mentions of stores like J. Crew and Hallmark and characters from a Warner Bros. Store (Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck). A boy's determined to buy a pair of Wolverine gloves like the ones in the X-Men movies. A character uses a Nokia phone.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

The story mentions that Afghan farmers grow poppies as a raw material for heroin and that for many Afghan parents, heroin is the only medicine they can find to "ease the suffering" of their children. A character smokes a cigarette.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Ground Zero , by Alan Gratz ( Refugee ), is told in alternating chapters by 9-year-old American Brandon Cruz and 11-year-old Reshmina, who lives in rural Afghanistan. Brandon's story begins on the morning of September 11, 2000. He's come to work with his father, who's a kitchen manager on 107 th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Reshmina begins her story on September 11, 2019, as her village becomes a deadly battleground between Taliban and American forces. For both, it's a day filled with violence. Brandon sees people burned alive, die in falling elevators, jump from high floors, and killed by the collapse of the Towers. In Afghanistan, Reshmina vividly describes the firefight between the Taliban and American soldiers and the destruction that comes to her village. But amid all this death and destruction there's also great courage and bravery, as strangers help one another escape the Towers and Reshmina's family risks their lives to give shelter to a wounded American soldier.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say (1)
• Kids say (9)

Based on 1 parent review

Two perspectives on 9-11

What's the story.

When 9-year-old Brandon Cruz goes to work with his father the morning of September 11, 2001, he has no idea they'll be at GROUND ZERO for a terrorist attack. Brandon's not in school because he's been suspended for punching a kid who stole a pair of Wolverine gloves from one of his friends. Leaving his father at work on the 107 th floor of the North Tower, Brandon heads down to the Tower's underground mall to buy a replacement pair. He's in an elevator when the first plane hits and becomes a hero when he helps save the other passengers. Desperate to find his father, Brandon tries to make his way up back up to the 107 th floor. On the way, he finds himself in need of rescue. He's saved by a man named Richard, who becomes his friend and guardian as they try to escape a building collapsing around them. Eighteen years later, 11-year-old Reshmina and her family are dealing with the aftermath of that attack -- constant battles between the Taliban and American soldiers who have been in Afghanistan since December 2001. Her twin brother, Pasoon, is determined to join the Taliban, and Reshmina seems powerless to stop him. After a firefight between the Taliban and American soldiers, Reshima finds the only American survivor, a young soldier named Taz. Risking everything, her family offers him shelter -- a decision they may regret as a fierce battle begins between the Americans and the Taliban.

Is It Any Good?

Author Alan Gratz delivers a haunting and powerful page-turner of a novel, this time focusing on terrorism and the costs of a long-fought war. Readers are certain to be inspired by the courage and determination shown by Brandon and Reshmina in Ground Zero . But that courage often comes amid storylines that include violent deaths that may be disturbing to sensitive readers. The history of America's involvement in Afghanistan is extraordinarily complex, and by viewing the war through Reshmina's eyes, Gratz does an able job of explaining it in a way younger readers will understand.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how the events in Ground Zero continue to affect the lives of people in Afghanistan. Do you agree with Reshmina that American soldiers being in Afghanistan has sometimes made things better and sometimes much worse?

What memories of 9/11 do members of your family have? Where were they when the Twin Towers were attacked?

If your brother, sister, or best friend was about to do something that would put them in real danger, what would you do?

Book Details

• Author : Alan Gratz
• Genre : Historical Fiction
• Topics : Book Characters , Great Boy Role Models , Great Girl Role Models , History
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Scholastic Press
• Publication date : February 2, 2021
• Publisher's recommended age(s) : 10 - 13
• Number of pages : 336
• Available on : Nook, Audiobook (unabridged), Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
• Last updated : February 2, 2021

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Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero October 11 release date revealed at Summer Game Fest

Go Super Saiyan with Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero when it launches this fall.

The wait is over — we finally know when we can get our hands (and monkey paws) on  Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero . The next entry in the Budokai Tenkaichi series launches October 11 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Revealed at Summer Game Fest, the latest trailer for  Sparking! Zero shows off new characters, like Ultra Instinct Goku and Goku Black, as well as seminal moments from its campaign, like Goku’s sacrifices against Raditz and Cell and his fight against Frieza. It also hints at possible What-If story moments like Goku going Super Saiyan against Great Ape Vegeta, Krillin joining Goku against Raditz, and Vegeta and Trunks teaming up to defeat Cell.

The end of the trailer debuts the game’s sick-ass box art, full of  Dragon Ball Super characters. Preordering nets you early unlocks for three variations of Gogeta (Super) and Broly (Super). It also hints at a mystery character as a preorder bonus — no word yet however if this mystery character will be unlockable in game or is a preorder exclusive.

Dragon Ball: Sparing! Zero is set to drop October 11, 2024, less than a year after its reveal at the 2023 Game Award s. Check out the new trailer below.

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Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars is the year’s goofiest tabletop skirmish game

With rock-solid rules written by a veteran of the Necromundan hive wars

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Share All sharing options for: Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars is the year’s goofiest tabletop skirmish game

Skirmish wargaming — traditional miniatures wargaming with a smaller footprint and fewer minis — is having a moment. Used to be there were just a few flavors available, but a new crop of games is suddenly giving all kinds of different energies. Grimdark Necromunda , futuristic Infinity , and stalwart Malifaux are all still around, of course. Their action remains brutal, and their rulesets fairly complex. Meanwhile, newcomers Cyberpunk Red: Combat Zone and Fallout: Factions are becoming more established thanks to dynamic sculpts, bright colors, and most importantly, far more simplified rules. There’s also Star Wars: Shatterpoint and Halo: Flashpoint , more refined games clearly built for brisk, competitive play.

Now comes Free League Publishing’s Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars , launching today with a new Core Set . It feels like this one is bringing some much-needed comic relief.

First launched as Mutant in 1984, the Swedish tabletop role-playing universe has been many things over the years. Funcom’s Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden refocused the franchise on its goofiest characters, human-and-animal hybrids with bizarre special abilities. It also helped that one of the main characters looks like an up-armored Howard the Duck. All the while, Free League has been working diligently in the background to keep the modern version of the TTRPG in circulation around the world.

Zone Wars smartly puts our duck friend back on the cover, and this time he’s the linchpin of a powerful band of Stalkers, mutant soldiers who enter the dangerous, irradiated Zone to scavenge for artifacts. It’s a simple premise that opens the door to clever scenario-based gameplay and the potential for linked campaigns.

The most surprising part is the completeness of this starter set, which includes a few short stacks of unit and ability cards, loads of cardboard terrain, bits and custom dice, but also pre-assembled and pre-shaded monochrome miniatures. Setup took me all of 20 minutes, and just about 30 minutes later I had already grokked most of the mechanics. That’s because the rules in the manual have been put together by Andy Chambers, co-designer of the original Necromunda (1995), and they are rock solid and easy to understand.

Gameplay is nuanced and engaging, but never tedious. Zone Wars has just enough complexity to keep you on your toes. You’ll need to keep track of where your miniatures are facing, for instance. Charging straight away into melee isn’t always the best move, even when your team has the advantage in numbers. Meanwhile, if you keep your distance it can be hard to level a kill shot. That’s because these little buggers are all pretty resilient!

Deal enough damage to a given character, and they’ll become broken. After tipping them on their side, the only available action you can take with them on their turn is recovery. But to recover, you’ll need a special item or a friend nearby to come to your aid. The recovery process involves rolling some dice, combining attributes of the rescuer and the rescued, then tallying up the results. If this succeeds, the broken character leaps to their feet with full health — only to become bloodied. If they go down again they’re absolutely out of action for that particular match, but unlike other more hardcore offerings true character death never happens.

The result is a lighthearted game of tactical Whac-a-Mole , filled with endearing critters with charming attributes taking devastating hits. But when they go down in a hail of bullets and feathers, they invariably leap heroically back to their webbed feet, makeshift guns blazing. I know of no other game where a moose-man can run antlers-first into an insect-man to score the winning point.

The best part is that even in a linked campaign with multiple missions — of the type offered in the game’s first expansion, Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars - Robots & Psionics — death isn’t really an issue. Even if your favorite character does go down for a second time in the heat of battle, they’ll absolutely be back for the next game. Because if there’s one thing funnier than doming Howard the Duck at range with a scavenged laser rifle, it’s doing it again... and again... and again over the course of a multi-session campaign.

Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars Core Set and Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars - Robots & Psionics are available now. The products were reviewed using a retail copy provided by Free League Publishing. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here .

Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars Core Set

Prices taken at time of publishing.

• $67 at Free League
• $70 at Amazon

Warhammer 40K illustrator John Blanche’s ‘grimdark femmes’ Kickstarter shatters goal

Where to pre-order magic: the gathering modern horizons 3, the newest humble bundle is full of hits from warhammer’s black library, loading comments....