"Her hands looked unnaturally pale in the moonlight."

In preparation for my reading of the new release The Devlin Diary by Christi Phillips, I decided to grab a copy of her first novel featuring historian Claire Donovan, The Rossetti Letter. And so I was again transported to Venice for another adventure featuring intrigue, violence and lovemaking.

Claire Donovan is a graduate student at Harvard writing her thesis on the so-called Spanish Conspiracy, a 1618 plot by high-ranking Spaniards to attack and conquer Venice, a missing jewel in the crown of Spanish dominance. After presenting a draft of her research to a local historical society, one of the kindly old ladies shows her an article that references a Cambridge professor who seems to be about to release a book on this same obscure topic. When the opportunity arises for Claire to travel to Venice (to chaperone fifteen year old Gwen), she decides to attend a historical conference to meet this mysterious author. In Venice, Claire finds that her personal life is as dead as the history she studies and she makes an attempt to breathe new life into both of them.

This book seemed like an intersection between two books that I have recently read. We have the female graduate student caught up in the past (The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane) who happens to be the divorced woman rediscovering herself in Venice (The Glassblower of Murano). Like both of these other novels, this one also shifts between a narrative from the past and the current one. I would rank this one below The Glassblower because it wasn't as compelling but above Deliverance Dane because Claire was a smarter and less annoying character than Connie. I liked that some issues were unresolved in this book without screaming "series". I look forward to Claire's next historical journey.

Steering my gondola clear of Venice for a bit,
K


Buy The Rossetti Letter on Amazon or find it at your local library.

New Release: The Glassblower of Murano

Already a bestseller elsewhere, Marina Fiorato's first novel, The Glassblower of Murano, is now being released in the United States. It is the story of a young woman who chooses to become a glassblower and then finds that an ancestor generations back was the premier glassblower in Murano, Venice. When Leonora's marriage ends, she decides to relocate from England to Venice and see if she can join the artistic community. When she arrives, bringing Corrado Manin's name with her, she gets both positive and negative receptions. Eventually Corradino is accused of having been a traitor to Venice and Leonora must fight to restore his good name and his place as a Venetian hero. Across the centuries, these two family members are dealing with some of the same issues of love, loss and betrayal.

This was a very well researched and well-written first novel. It switches between the present of Leonora and the past, belonging to Corradino. Within these two time periods it was told mostly in third person but with some first person thoughts interspersed throughout the narrative. This really helped me relate to the characters and to care about them. Also, the Venice built by Fiorato is beautiful and unique. If you are tentative about reading historical fiction, this would be a good one to start with.

Yearning for a connection with the past,
K


Buy The Glassblower of Murano on Amazon or find it at your local library.

New Release: Stone's Fall

I have read everything written by Iain Pears and so I feel qualified to say that Stone's Fall is some of his best work. This is a lengthy novel at 800 pages but is quick-reading, as evidenced by the fact that I got through it in five days!

The novel is written in three parts. The first is by Matthew Braddock, a journalist charged with trying to track down the illegitimate child mentioned in the will of recently-deceased financial genius John Stone, Lord Ravenscliff. This youngish man begins the probing of John Stone's past but runs up against secrets whose answers are hidden in the past. The second and third accounts are by Henry Cort, a British intelligence boss, and John Stone himself, respectively. These earlier reminiscences fill in the story and reveal many of the mysteries that Braddock was unable to solve.

The depth and layers of this novel were staggering. And yet somehow Pears manages to tie up dozens of loose ends in a mostly satisfying manner. The characters he creates in this story are complex and my opinions of the main players changed frequently throughout the different narratives. Some readers have said that they were confused or turned-off by some financial language used in the novel but I felt that it was really negligible and did not dominate the narrative. Overall, this is a complex page-turner that is worth revisiting at some point. I would love to read it again with the omnipotence that I gained by the end.

If you are in the Seattle area, Iain Pears will be at Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park) tonight at 7pm. I'm hoping to be there!

Building a strong distrust of businessmen,
K


Buy Stone's Fall: A Novel on Amazon or find it at your local library.

"Wherever I went I saw a question mark at the heart of the city."

Why is it that so many of the mysteries I read that are set in Venice are the most crass or violent kind? This book, The Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson, is a psychological suspense story set in modern day Venice but involving a mystery from 1960s England. The mystery itself and the unexpected solution are inventive but some of the plot elements seemed random and irrelevant.

Adam is a recent college graduate who is an aspiring writer. Through a series of random events, he ends up employed by a one-time writer who is now holed up in a villa in Venice. Adam is supposed to take care of cleaning, cooking and home maintenance but ends up working on the author's correspondence and finds what appears to be a blackmail letter. He decides to find out the history behind the letter and ends up in a complex situation caused by lies and deception.

The writing was good in this book and the ending was creepy and strange. Andrew Wilson has also written a biography of Patricia Highsmith, if you're a fan of hers.

A bit scared of a trip to Venice,
K


Buy The Lying Tongue on Amazon or find it at your local library.