Liquid Desires
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Publisher Description
A shocking murder draws Urbino Macintyre into the dark side of the Venice art world
Summer in Venice is brutal, and the heat is beginning to drive the people of this quiet city mad. A woman storms into the galleries at the Biennale art fair and slashes a painting with a knife. A young girl is found raped and murdered in her own bed. And a model named Flavia Brollo appears at the home of Urbino Macintyre’s closest friend, the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini, to declare that she is the noblewoman’s illegitimate daughter. It is an outrageous declaration, and it will mean the contessa’s doom.
When Flavia is found floating in the canal, Macintyre dedicates himself to finding the person who murdered this poor, disturbed woman. His inquiries lead him back to the Biennale, where the art world’s most powerful figures congregate to buy, sell, and indulge their darkest desires. Before the fair is over, Macintyre will discover that even murder can be a work of art.
“Teems with intrigue and atmosphere.” —Publishers Weekly
“The atmosphere . . . rises thicker than the predawn fog that rolls off the Grand Canal.” —The New York Times on Death in a Serene City
“Subdued and quietly refined.” —Library Journal on Death in a Serene City
Edward Sklepowich (b. 1943) is an American author of mysteries. Raised in Connecticut, he grew up living with his parents and his grandparents, who immersed him in Italian culture and Neapolitan dialect from a young age. A Fulbright scholarship took him to Europe and Africa, and he has made his home across the Mediterranean, living in Venice, Naples, Egypt, and Tunisia. Deeply connected to his Italian heritage, Sklepowich has used the country as the setting for all of his fiction.
Sklepowich’s debut novel, Death in a Serene City (1990), introduced Urbino Macintyre, an American expatriate and amateur sleuth who undertakes to solve a Venetian murder. Sklepowich treats Venice as a character, using its ancient atmosphere to shape his classically structured mysteries. He has written eight more Mysteries of Venice—most recently, The Veils of Venice (2009).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While Sklepowich's latest crime novel set in Venice teems with intrigue and atmosphere, it is lamentably lacking such crime fiction staples as plot and suspense. As in Death in a Serene City and Farewell to the Flesh , murder visits the rarefied social strata inhabited by American expatriate writer Urbino Macintyre and his close friend, the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini. Dark events conspire to interrupt the flow of their sophisticated pontifications: a young woman is raped and murdered, another slashes a valuable portrait and demands an audience with the Contessa. When the enigmatic Flavia Brollo appears, claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of the Contessa's late, adored husband, Urbino begins to investigate the life of this clearly unhappy girl. He finds a misshapen family tree and some hints of possible drug use just before Flavia's body is pulled from a canal--with three quarters of the book still remaining. By this time, though, many readers' patience will be nearly exhausted and unlikely to be restored by the surfeit of artistic aunts, uncles, fathers and other aesthetes the author throws their way. Light relief does come in the form of Urbino's blustering ex-brother-in-law, intent both on buying art and on bringing Macintyre and his former wife back together. Although sometimes charming, this deliberately mannered book is overlong and underplotted.
