Never Fall for a Valenti

Everyone warned her about him. No one told her why.

At a fundraising gala in Rome, an old journalist points across the room at a man in a black suit who is talking to nobody, and tells Alessia Rain to be careful of him.

Alessia asks what he has done. The answer, it turns out, is the story: nobody knows. In forty years nobody has finished the sentence. Not the notary who has handled the family's business since 1989. Not the woman who nursed the man's dying mother. Not a single one of the four hundred people in that room, all of whom will tell her to be careful and none of whom will say of what.

Luca Valenti is the family's lawyer. In fifteen years he has drafted eleven documents that make people disappear — legally, faultlessly, with a signature and a fee — and he has never once declined to use one. When Alessia finally puts the question to him directly, he does not deny anything. He tells her, with great precision, that he is not permitted to answer.

Eight years earlier her older sister spent a season cataloguing a library at the Valenti house outside Rome. Then a payment arrived from a lawyer's client account, and Maya rang to say she would be out of touch, and no one has heard from her since.

"She is my client," he says.

What Alessia uncovers is not a crime. It is something colder and older and far harder to write about — and by the time she understands it, she has spent nine months in the company of a careful man who has been protecting her sister from her, without a single error, since the week Maya disappeared.

A slow-burn romance and a quiet mystery, set in Rome — about a family that has kept out of the newspapers for eighty years, the price of never being described, and a woman who finds out that the story she has been telling herself since 2018 was hers and not her sister's.