A Murder in Tuscany (Sandro Cellini)

About this book

Sandro Cellini P. I. Florences answer to Donna Leons Guido Brunetti returns in this atmospheric mystery set in a forbidding castle. As Sandro Cellini comes to grips with the tough realities of life as a private detective touting for business among old contacts and following errant teenagers an old case comes back to haunt him. Once the subject of a routine background check back in Sandros earliest days as a private investigator the glamorous charming and ruthless Loni Meadows the director of an American-Italian artistic retreat in a castle in the hills outside Florence goes off the icy road in her car one night. The circumstances of her death seem less than accidental to Sandro. However inconvenient his suspicions might be both to Sandrowhose marriage appears to be disintegrating in the aftermath of his wifes illnessand to Meadowss erstwhile employers the detective presses on. As he attempts to uncover the truth of Meadowss violent and lonely death Sandro finds himself drawn into the lives of the castles highly strung community and the closed world they inhabit in the isolated Etruscan hills of the Maremma. Reminiscent of a locked-room mystery in the style of Agatha Christie A Murder in Tuscany leads the reader from one possible perpetrator to the next; to Sandros chagrin all of the artists in residence at the time of Lonis demise had more than enough reason to dislike her. But who in the group had the most compelling motive to want her dead? Kent is a masterful investigator of character and mood and her second mystery conveys the gloom of the Orfeo castle as well as the individual dark lives of its inhabitants in a chilling memorable way.