Billie Walker returns for another case, beginning in Sydney, 1948. Β This former war correspondent found that jobs were given to men in Australia at the warβs end. She set about reopening her late fatherβs private inquiry office. This time, she learns of THE ITALIAN SECRET her father kept hidden. Β Darlene Elliott is a young woman with a controlling, violent husband. Sheβs come to Billie for help in getting a divorce. DI Hank Cooper doesnβt like bullies, but the police canβt do much without evidence. Billie and her staff are gathering photos and impressions of the husband. This is just routine for them, but it doesnβt seem urgent. With matters settled, Billie decides to book a holiday. She and her mother, Baroness Ella Von Hooft, and Ellaβs lady companion, Alma McGuire, will board the first cruise ship to revisit the popular tourist journey to Italy. Β All this seems to take place quite slowly, with many discussions and sorting of old office papers. Billieβs determination to see Naples is based on a letter and a photo in her fatherβs 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. Β The viewpoints of two other women are provided, one leaving Sydney at the turn of the century to head to Italy at her familyβs 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. Β 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.
An old family secret leads from the streets of Sydney to Italy’s sun-drenched Neapolitan coast, in this immersive historical mystery from #1 international bestselling author Tara Moss
Pacific Ocean, 1907. A girl embarks on a journey to begin a new life far from home.
Naples, 1943. A woman shelters underground from a wartime air raid, praying her husband will return home.
Sydney, 1948. Billie Walker, returned from a stint as a wartime investigative journalist, uncovers a dusty box in her father’s old office whose contents—correspondence with a woman on the other side of the world—just might explain how they all are connected.
Plunged into a perilous search that will take her onto the first postwar luxury passenger ship to sail across the ocean to Italy, Billie finds herself up against a dangerous adversary—someone with a mysterious grudge against her family—as she races to uncover the secrets her father left behind. And as the trail leads her towards two women whose histories may be entwined with her own, she realizes that her father’s Italian secret just might upend everything she thought she knew.
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