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!
MeetΒ Sandro Cellini, Florenceβs answer to Donna Leonβs 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 husbandβs suicide.Β 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 architectβs last hours through the worst rains since the devastating floods of 1966, a young Englishwoman is found to have gone missing from the cityβs community of hard-drinking, high-living art students, and Sandroβs 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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