Berkley Prime Crime
December 2012
On Sale: December 4, 2012
294 pages ISBN: 0425247880 EAN: 9780425247884 Kindle: B008JHXQCA Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
Now, the celebrated Skeleton Detective is
visiting friends at a vineyard in Tuscany when murder leaves
a bitter aftertaste… It was the unwavering custom of Pietro
Cubbiddu, patriarch of Tuscany’s Villa Antica wine empire,
to take a solitary month-long sabbatical at the end of the
early grape harvest, leaving the winery in the trusted hands
of his three sons. His wife, Nola, would drive him to an
isolated mountain cabin in the Apennines and return for him
a month later, bringing him back to his family and business.
So it went for almost a decade—until the year came when
neither of them returned. Months later, a hiker in the
Apennines stumbles on their skeletal remains. The
carabinieri investigate and release their findings: they are
dealing with a murder-suicide. The evidence makes it clear
that Pietro Cubbiddu shot and killed his wife and then
himself. The likely motive: his discovery that Nola had been
having an affair. Not long afterwards, Gideon Oliver and his
wife, Julie, are in Tuscany visiting their friends, the
Cubbiddu offspring. The renowned Skeleton Detective is asked
to reexamine the bones. When he does, he reluctantly
concludes that the carabinieri, competent though they may
be, have gotten almost everything wrong. Whatever it was
that happened in the mountains, a murder-suicide it was not.
Soon Gideon finds himself in a morass of family antipathies,
conflicts, and mistrust, to say nothing of the local
carabinieri’s resentment. And when yet another Cubbiddu
relation meets an unlikely end, it becomes bone-chillingly
clear that the killer is far from finished…
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