SECRETS AMONG FRIENDS

A consultant investigates the suspicious sudden death of a longtime friend in Ciccone’s mystery.

For Paul Pandolfo’s entire adult life, he’s had a close relationship with Tom Fairbanks. They were on the same high school football team, went to the same college, and went on to work at different divisions of conglomerate Quality Products. Tom supported and enabled every success in Paul’s life, and even after Paul’s girlfriend left him for Tom, they remained loyal friends; the couple got married and moved overseas, where Tom rose through the ranks of their company’s European division. Soon after Tom hires Paul to consult on a new business venture in the Balkans, Paul finds his friend dead from a heart attack; apparently, Tom had just attended a mysterious dinner with unknown parties. Paul spends the next five years investigating what really happened to his friend, uncovering a tragic web of dark family secrets, tied to the bloody history of the region. The many facets of Ciccone’s protagonist, an engineer turned consultant turned amateur private investigator, reflect the book’s unusual but engaging combination of genres. Travel writing combines with what can only be described as a cozy thriller to create something that feels simultaneously new and familiar. The author writes vividly about the myriad locations his characters explore throughout Eastern Europe, and the novel will definitely scratch a reader’s travel-writing itch, but it works equally well as a story of a nonprofessional sleuth digging into a complex story. As thrilling as the story is, it never explodes into violence or chase sequences. Instead of shootouts or scenes of characters in tight hiding spots, readers get focused discourse among journalists and businesspeople, comparing notes about what happened to Tom, and the novel is much stronger for it.

A low-key but high-stakes thriller about the bonds of friendship.