A riveting whodunit that makes full use of its dramatic setting.
In Volker’s debut mystery, an American financial expert unravels a web of mystery, corruption, and danger hidden in one of the world’s most beautiful cities.
In 1992, when Count Sergio Corrin is stabbed to death at a fundraising gala, half of Venice, Italy, mourns him as a philanthropist and city father while the other half seems to wish that they’d killed him themselves. Anna Lottol, an FBI agent specializing in exposing money laundering schemes, made the mistake of having an affair with Corrin, discovering too late that he used everyone to his own advantage. When he tried to blackmail her with compromising photos, she traveled to Venice to plead for mercy only to find herself the prime suspect when Corrin is murdered. With the help of her American journalist friend, Margo, Anna tries to prove her innocence by launching her own investigation into the crime. Along the way, she explores the corrupt underside of Venetian society, shady financial deals, romance gone wrong, and the enduring legacy of the destruction of the Incan Empire. But as she gets closer to the truth, she repeatedly finds herself in mortal danger. The subtitle of Volker’s novel signals the importance of the Venetian setting to her compelling, intricate narrative. Her lush descriptions evoke the city’s glories (“the glittering swath of Venice’s watery arteries and veins narrowing to wispy capillaries, shining in the sun”) while skillfully building an ominous tone (“The oar of a gondola in the distance hit the water in a frenzy, making Anna think of the flapping wings of a drowning seabird”). All the mysteries and problems of Anna’s life seem to wrap up a bit too neatly, but readers will forgive this, as they also receive an engaging guided tour through ancient crimes and modern vice in one of Europe’s most graceful cities.
A riveting whodunit that makes full use of its dramatic setting.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-310-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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