THE ASSASSIN OF VENICE

Courtesan by night, ruthless killer whenever duty calls.

As Valentina Riccardi walks the crowded streets of Venice inconspicuously, like “an ordinary Venetian woman out for the holiday celebration” of Ascension Day 1538, her employer, politician and spymaster Ambrogio Malatesta, is close by, and so is her target, a redheaded Spaniard who’s a client of her fellow courtesan Marietta. Valentina dispatches the Spaniard with ease and vanishes into the crowd in Palombo’s Venice, which is beautiful, dangerous, and sensual, especially for the wealthy power brokers who patronize Valentina and her colleagues. The Venetian Council of Ten, which Malatesta controls, can be mentioned only in whispers. This highly entertaining story unfolds as a procession of tautly depicted contract killings, transactional sexual encounters, and more fervent trysts with Valentina’s lover Bastiano Bragadin, all of which the courtesan narrates with cool, luxe precision. The only crack in her composure is caused by her painful separation from the couple’s daughter, Ginevra, who’s being raised on a farm far from the city. Valentina is torn between the luxury and vibrancy her two métiers provide and the yearning for a conventional life with her lover and daughter. But a much larger crack appears when she’s assigned to kill her beloved Bastiano. In a series of “Interludes” set a decade earlier, the ebullience of young Maria Angelina, rapturously in love with her fiance, Massimo, a wealthy merchant’s son, contrasts sharply with Valentina’s calculating, Machiavellian mind. This backstory ends with a surprising twist that cleverly links the two plots.

A juicy tale of romantic suspense, elegantly appointed.