The Thief of Venice
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
With her usual “sparkling prose and inimitable wit,” the award-wining author follows her scholar/sleuth and his wife as they investigate a death in Venice (Publishers Weekly).
Four-month summer holidays, spring break, and regular sabbaticals mean that Harvard professors Mary and Homer Kelly never have trouble finding time to vacation. Unfortunately, Homer’s sideline as an amateur sleuth means that they rarely get to relax during their time off. And so, when Homer begs Mary to let them visit Venice to attend a conference in the famed rare book library of Cardinal Bessarion, Mary agrees on condition that Homer avoid any dead bodies. When they arrive in Venice, it is Mary, not Homer, who stumbles upon a murder. An intent sightseer, she combs the city with her camera, snapping pictures of anything that catches her eye. But when one of her snapshots captures something it shouldn’t, Mary is sucked into a decades-old mystery that stretches back to the darkest moments of World War II.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her 14th Homer Kelly mystery (after The Face on the Wall), Langton's sparkling prose and inimitable wit offer a delectable feast for the discriminating reader. Homer, a policeman-turned-scholar, and his professor wife, Mary, have ventured to Venice to attend a scholarly conference on rare books. Homer is intoxicated by the riches afforded in the Biblioteca Marciana, while Mary prowls the streets of the Italian city, camera in hand. An expatriate English doctor, Richard Henchard, seeking an apartment for his demanding mistress, stumbles upon a cache of golden artifacts. He kills twice to protect his secret, and his path soon intersects Mary's, whom he attempts to seduce. Then one of Mary's myriad photos of Venice reveals the whereabouts of a missing woman, Lucia Costanza, who has allegedly murdered her husband. The dead husband was actually one of Dr. Henchard's victims, and Signora Costanza has gone into hiding until the real murderer is caught. Complicating the search for Costanza and her husband's killer is the annual Venetian flood, the acqua alta, for events come to a head even as the city suffers a particularly severe inundation. With a master hand, Langton develops the various subplots into a sophisticated, elegantly constructed thriller in which justice has its day, true love is rewarded and faith provides the most important answer of all. Line illustrations by the author. Author tour. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
