A Murder in Tuscany
A Sandro Cellini Mystery by Christobel Kent
Review: A commentary on a recent change of life job starts this second mystery to feature Florence private investigator Sandro Cellini, with a wondering of how this had happened. Rich and poor class differences sets this story up as a who done it, or whose done it.
The detail is most impressive and winds one's intrigue toward an unveiling of the characters so that you are hooked even before you know it.
A castle in Florence that one might believe to be the perfect location for a murder … or is it?
This book had me travelling to an elaborate setting and filled interactive characters that impact not only on each other but on the location.
I thought I had it figured all out only to be surprised in the end. A great read if you like detail of place and person.
A Murder in Tuscany was originally published in the UK as A Fine and Private Place.
Special thanks to Lynne Gordon for contributing her review of A Murder in Tuscany.
Acknowledgment: Minotaur Books provided a copy of A Murder in Tuscany for this review.
Review Copyright © 2011 — Lynne Gordon — All Rights Reserved
Reprinted with Permission
Selected reviews of other mysteries by this author …
The Drowning River
Minotaur Books (Hardcover), July 2010
ISBN-13: 9780312621018; ISBN-10: 0312621019
Location(s) referenced in A Murder in Tuscany: Florence, Italy
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A Murder in Tuscany by Christobel Kent
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 0-312-62102-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-62102-5
Publication Date: August 2011
List Price: $25.99
Synopsis (from the publisher): 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 Sandro’s 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 Sandro—whose marriage appears to be disintegrating in the aftermath of his wife’s illness—and to Meadows’s erstwhile employers, the detective presses on. As he attempts to uncover the truth of Meadows’s violent and lonely death, Sandro finds himself drawn into the lives of the castle’s 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 Sandro’s chagrin, all of the artists in residence at the time of Loni’s demise had more than enough reason to dislike her. But who in the group had the most compelling motive to want her dead?