A good detective story taking place in a beautiful part of Italy is a real treat for people who enjoy reading crime mysteries and also happen to love Italy. Use this website to find out more about the locations, the lifestyle and the food and the wine experienced by the characters created by your favourite authors.

20150727

Inspector Cataldo’s Criminal Summer

By Luigi Guicciardi 

The apparent suicide of an academic brings Inspector Cataldo to a quiet holiday town in the Apennines during a particularly hot summer.

Suspecting murder, he questions the dead man’s wife and friends and discovers a common link between them all with a graduation dinner held in the past. And he finds that a mysterious stranger has arrived in the town and has shaken up the delicate social balance of a group of people who have a lot to hide. 

Soon there is another death and the Inspector becomes desperate to uncover the motive behind the killings to prevent the murderer striking again. Suffering in the hot conditions, Inspector Cataldo becomes nostalgic for his native Sicily and remembers a past love and romantic disappointment while he strives to solve the case.

Translated from the Italian by Iain Halliday, this novel was originally published in Italy as La Calda Estate del Commissario Cataldo. 

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20150707

Death in Autumn


A Marshal Guarnaccia investigation by Magdalen Nabb


Marshal Guarnaccia’s instincts come to be heavily relied upon by his Carabinieri captain during a difficult investigation into the murder of a lonely German woman living in Florence.

The woman’s body had been found floating in the River Arno clad only in a fur coat and jewellery.
The Marshal’s big, slightly protuding eyes notice everything and he soon works out who is lying to him when he makes his enquiries at the hotel in he city where she had been living for the last 15 years and at the villa she owned in Greve in Chianti.

He is intrigued to find out she had become friends with the night porter at the hotel and he is also suspicious of the young people who are renting the villa from her.

The Captain is glad to follow the Marshal’s intuition in this complex case. He and his men are already stretched by an operation to track down the dealers at the centre of the drugs trade in the city that has recently led to the deaths of two young people and he is feeling pressurised by the Substitute Prosecutor to get a quick result in the murder case.

Magdalen Nabb brings the streets and squares of Florence alive in this clever, well-written mystery, which keeps the reader guessing till the end.

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20150702

The Assisi Murders


An Achille Peroni mystery by Timothy Holme


Commissario Achille Peroni is tempted by plenty of beautiful women while on a pilgrimage to Assisi but he finds himself irresistibly drawn to a lady who had lived in the city during the 13th century.

When one of his fellow pilgrims is arrested on a charge of shooting her lover, Peroni takes it upon himself to conduct an investigation completely independent of the police officers assigned to the case from Perugia.

But his enquiries uncover a 13th century mystery involving a woman who had been a confidante of St Francis of Assisi himself.

Timothy Holme skilfully blends Peroni’s investigations into the present day murder with his fascinating journey into the past intrigues of medieval Assisi, which are revealed in the letters the Commissario discovers written by St Francis’s close female friend, the fascinating Jacopa de Settesoli.

He is ably assisted in the investigation by an eccentric English woman crime writer living in Assisi, Dame Iolanthe Higgins, a well-drawn character who adds humour and colour to the story.

As ever, Timothy Holme serves up an intriguing mystery that is also amusing and entertaining for his readers.

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