Excellent Cadavers - a term used in Sicily to distinguish the assassination of prominent government officials from the hundreds of common criminals killed in the course of routine mafia business - tells of the remarkable investigation spearheaded by Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two Sicilian prosecutors who in the 1980s took the war against the Mafia further than anyone had ever dared. They succeeded in penetrating the Mafia's code of silence and revealed for the first time the structure and extent of the Mafia's powers. But dramatic as Falcone's and Borsellino's success was, it was followed by the Italian government's even more dramatic effort to unravel what they had achieved and to impede further investigation.