Sandro Cellini is finally coming out of his depression
after losing his job of many years on the Italian police
force and taking his wife's insistent advice to become a
private investigator. Putting off starting his new
profession is no longer an option when his first client is
waiting outside his door one day.
Claudio Gentileschi's widow does not believe her husband
killed himself by jumping into the river, regardless of his
early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Sandro is reluctant to
take on a clear case of suicide, but the widow's desperate
pleas for him to find answers pulls on his heartstrings and
he is in need of the work. While Sandro, along with the
help of his wife, looks into the suicide, another case
crosses his path complicating the investigation by
introducing a missing girl.
Iris March is an English art student enjoying the
opportunity of a lifetime to study in Italy. Iris is not
your typical beauty and is always the odd girl out,
especially with her wealthy and always popular roommate,
Ronnie. Ronnie and Iris have been friends for years
throughout school and Iris's situation still hasn't changed
much. She is still making excuses for Ronnie at school,
covering for Ronnie while Iris studies and plays at being
the adult. One afternoon, Iris is once again covering for
Ronnie when Ronnie's bag is found by a stranger and turned
into the police. Suspicious of the situation, Iris begins
asking her own questions in an attempt to find out what
happened to her roommate, along with help from a friend and
a private investigator.
THE DROWNING RIVER is a smart and stimulating read with
twists and turns throughout the entire book. I love the
challenge!
Meet Sandro Cellini, Florence’s answer
to Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti.
One wet November in
Florence, the grieving widow of an eminent Jewish architect
comes to visit Sandro Cellini, good husband, disgraced
ex-policeman, and recently turned PI, to ask him to
investigate her husband’s suicide. Cellini takes her on
out of sympathy, although this first case makes a downbeat
start to his new career. There seems no doubt that Claudio
Gentileschi, a Holocaust survivor and lifelong depressive
found drowned on a bleak stretch of the River Arno, did take
his own life, and initially Cellini imagines that his only
duty is to support the widow through her time of mourning.
But as Cellini doggedly retraces the architect’s last
hours through the worst rains since the devastating floods
of 1966, a young Englishwoman is found to have gone missing
from the city’s community of hard-drinking, high-living art
students, and Sandro’s search turns abruptly into something
grimmer and more urgent than he could have imagined, as he
uncovers a network of greed and corruption that is hidden
under a veneer of tradition and refinement.
The
Drowning River is a spot-on, atmospheric new mystery,
the first in a series featuring Cellini.
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