The Dead Season by Christobel Kent, a Mysterious Review.

Review: Ex-policeman, now private investigator Sandro Cellini takes on the case of a missing fiancé. Pre-wedding jitters? Possibly, though two other people are suddenly reported missing as well, in The Dead Season, the third mystery in this series by Christobel Kent.

It is summer in Florence and it is hot. Stifling hot. Many of the city's residents have fled to seek cooler climes, but Cellini has remained, working through the month, just as he did all those years as a Captain in the Polizia dello Stato. His friend and ex-partner, Pietro Cavallaro, shares with him some information reported by Anna Niescu, a young girl, unmarried and eight months pregnant, who says her fiancé Josef has disappeared. He had told her he would be working on getting an apartment for them to live in. Meanwhile, a bank employee has become concerned that one of her regular customers, one who always had a bag of cash, has stopped coming in. And now the bank manager is missing, too. It seems unlikely to Cellini that these aren't related, but what could these three people have in common? And then there's that unidentified dead body that has been found by the side of the road …

There is a large cast of interesting characters in The Dead Season, their reaction to being questioned by Cellini almost directly correlated to how irritated they are from the hot weather. Indeed, the temperature seems to be a metaphor for the investigation itself; when there is break in the heat, there will be a break in the case. Cellini is a strongly developed character, the setting is colorful in spite of the heat, there are touches of humor here and there to balance the frustration felt by everyone involved, and the murder mystery storyline is cleverly devised and plays out in a satisfactory manner.

Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of The Betz Review for contributing her review of The Dead Season.

Acknowledgment: Pegasus Books provided a copy of The Dead Season for this review.

A Murder in Tuscany
Minotaur Books (Hardcover), August 2011
ISBN-13: 9780312621025; ISBN-10: 0312621027

The Dead Season

A Sandro Cellini Mystery by Christobel Kent