YMMV / The Prague Cemetery

• Complete Monster: "Captain" Simone Simonini is a backstabbing, manipulative, racist mercenary who lives by the motto "I hate therefore I am". Simonini started his career under the apprenticeship of an unscrupulous lawyer and betrayed him as part of a deal with the Piedmont government, selling out dozens of his companions. Planted as The Mole in Garibaldi's Thousand to gather state secrets, Simonini is exiled to Paris after sinking a ship just to destroy some confidential papers. As an agent of the Imperial secret service, Simonini organizes a conspiracy just to uncover it himself in an attempt to impress his superiors, sending his disposable friends to die of malarial fever in the French Guiana. A fervent antisemite who dumps the bodies of his own accomplices in the sewers, Simonini not only strangles a mentally ill woman to death just because he was afraid of having impregnated someone of Jewish descent, but is also revealed to have been the creator of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
• Spiritual Successor: To Foucault's Pendulum; many of the themes of the latter book are foreshadowed in the later chapters of the former. However, while the protagonists of Foucault's Pendulum are basically good people driven by curiosity (Casaubon), mysticism (Diotallevi) and personal frustration (Belbo), who find out too late that they're in way too deep, Simonini is a detestable character who willingly participates in fraud For the Evulz.