A Rick Montoya Italian Mystery
Poisoned Pen Press
September 2013
On Sale: September 3, 2013
Featuring: Erica; Rick Montoya; Beppo
250 pages ISBN: 1464201900 EAN: 9781464201905 Hardcover Add to Wish List
Rick Montoya has just moved from Santa Fe to Rome, embracing the life of a translator. HeΓ’β¬β’s beginning to embrace la dolce vita when school friend Beppo, now senior in the Italian Art Squad, recruits Rick for an unofficial undercover role. Armed with a list of galleries, suspects, and an expense account, Rick would arrive in Tuscany posing as a buyer for a Santa Fe gallery and flush out traffickers in priceless burial urns.
But, before sunset on his first day in Volterra, the challenge intensifies. Rick has one quick conversation with a gallery employee who dies minutes later in a brutal fall from a high cliff. Has the trade in fraudulent artifacts upgraded to murder? Are the traffickers already on to Rick?
The local Commissario and his team consider Rick an amateur, and worse, a foreigner. Plus Rick is a suspect in what proves to be the dead manΓ’β¬β’s murder. While the Volterra squad pursues its leads, Rick and the Volterra museum director continue to interview his list: a top gallery owner, a low-profile import/export businessman and his enterprising color-coordinated assistant, a sensuous heiress with a private art specialty and clientele. When RickΓ’β¬β’s lover Erica, an art history professor, arrives from Rome to visit him, she rekindles a friendship with an alluring, maybe dangerous, heiress. Has RickΓ’β¬β’s role made him the target of both cops and criminals?
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