Ghirlandaio's Daughter

JACKET NOTES:  The figure lay on its back, arms flung wide, with the bronze spear of a Mycenaean warrior planted squarely in the middle of its chest.
Nigel Harmsworth, septuagenarian and expatriate English painter, stared at the splayed corpse in disbelief. That he should find himself surveying the body of a dead American in the garden of the beautiful Tuscan villa owned by his friend and patron Sir Richard Danvers, an international art dealer, was extraordinary enough. More unsettling still were the events that were to follow, and the secrets that would emerge from the past.
Peter Morgan, a senior partner in a prestigious Philadelphia law firm, had inadvertently stumbled upon certain details about a Renaissance painting and had come to Italy to pull off the scam of the century. What he had uncovered was worth millions of dollars, conveniently dwarfing his gambling debts, and Morgan was prepared to tap into a lucrative conspiracy that ran its tentacles into half a dozen countries and touched some of the richest men in the world.
What no one anticipated, however, were the prodigious deductive powers of Detective Carlo Arbati, visiting the medieval town of Lucca to receive an award for his most recent volume of poems. When the poet-detective is drawn into the case, justice is certain to triumph--but more blood must flow before Arbati is able to unweave the tangled web of intrigue and deceit that has baffled the local authorities.
Ghirlandaio’s Daughter. John Spencer Hills successor to The Last Castrato. displays once again his ability to elevate a story of detection and suspense above the restrictive confines of the genre.
(© St. Martin’s Press)