Beth de Bilio

Vendetta Con Brio

(also titled The Widow's Escort)

JACKET NOTES:  "The first time Paul saw the hearse was at the hotel in Zadar."

So begins one of the strangest suspense novels of modern times. Set against a background of enormous wealth and corrupt Italian aristocracy, it is centered around the Morelli-Adimari family, twentieth-century facsimiles of the Borgias.

Paul Hesse, an American businessman on vacation, falls in love with Donna Selvaggia Morelli-Adimari in the exotic setting of Lake Como. She is beautiful, she is elegant, she is a principessa, and she travels much. Wherever she goes she is accompanied by a retinue who are more like bodyguards than servants, and sometimes more like spies than bodyguards. This much Paul knows. What he doesn't know is why, no matter where she travels, Donna Selvaggia is always followed by a hearse.

This is the story of a terrible crime, a macabre punishment, and finally, played out with almost unbearable tension, a brilliant revenge.
(© The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.)