Billie Walker returns for another case, beginning in Sydney, 1948.  This former war correspondent found that jobs were given to men in Australia at the war’s end. She set about reopening her late father’s private inquiry office. This time, she learns of THE ITALIAN SECRET her father kept hidden.   Darlene Elliott is a young woman with a controlling, violent husband. She’s come to Billie for help in getting a divorce. DI Hank Cooper doesn’t like bullies, but the police can’t do much without evidence. Billie and her staff are gathering photos and impressions of the husband. This is just routine for them, but it doesn’t seem urgent. With matters settled, Billie decides to book a holiday. She and her mother, Baroness Ella Von Hooft, and Ella’s lady companion, Alma McGuire, will board the first cruise ship to revisit the popular tourist journey to Italy.   All this seems to take place quite slowly, with many discussions and sorting of old office papers. Billie’s determination to see Naples is based on a letter and a photo in her father’s effects. Two-thirds of the book passes before she boards the SS Luxor, but some bad things have happened. She might have known they would keep happening. The luxury liner from Sydney to Naples provides some contrasts with post-war life in Australia. However, the biggest contrast is with the city of Naples, once stunning, much of it now a bombed shell in wonderful scenery.   The viewpoints of two other women are provided, one leaving Sydney at the turn of the century to head to Italy at her family’s insistence, the other enduring the war years in Naples. The reader can find this confusing at times, and the threads are pulled together by Billie. A family drama unites the women, and violence threatens them all.   The Ghosts of Paris was the previous book I read in this vivid, haunting series by Tara Moss. I found that one emphasised the war years, and Billie came across as more of a journalist. In this story, her PI career feels depressingly the same as modern times, and her vacation is a study in elegance versus poverty. THE ITALIAN SECRET is a gently paced historical crime fiction, and if Billie does feel too modern in her ideas, she has her earnings so she can ignore everyone telling her to get married, like many other women on the continents stripped of able-bodied young men by two World Wars.