THE SLEEPING NYMPH

The creepiest painting ever encountered in fiction or real life sends a beleaguered Italian police officer searching for the killer in a 70-year-old case.

Before he gave up painting at the age of 23, Alessio Andrian completed fewer than a dozen pictures. Raffaello Andrian, the artist’s great-nephew, has offered the last of them, The Sleeping Nymph, to gallery owner Gianmaria Gortan, whose routine tests of the painting have disclosed something deeply disturbing: the presence of blood. The Sleeping Nymph isn’t marred by traces of blood; the whole painting has been executed in blood—and not the artist’s own—mixed with the odd bit of cardiac tissue, as if to establish its authenticity. Charged with investigating the presumed murder of the sleeping nymph, Superintendent Teresa Battaglia finds that Alessio Andrian, though he’s still alive, hasn’t spoken since he completed the picture in 1945. So she follows the nymph’s trail to the Slovenian region of Resia, where she’s swiftly caught up in tales of the artist’s resistance to the occupying Germans as the war wound down. As a present-day murder forces her to ask whether she’s really looking for a single killer pushing 90, she has to contend with two other adversaries: Albert Lona, an old enemy who’s stepped in to replace her suddenly stricken boss, and her own creeping dementia, which she’s struggling to keep secret. It’s lucky that she can obtain the services of Smoky, an amazingly talented Human Remains Detection dog, and Blanca Zago, his blind trainer, because she’ll need all the help she can get.

A sprawling, ambitious thriller for readers with a taste for florid invention and broad strokes of the supernatural.