The Italian Secret
A Novel
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4,4 • 5 đánh giá
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- 14,99 US$
Lời Giới Thiệu Của Nhà Xuất Bản
An old family secret leads from the streets of Sydney to Italy’s sun-drenched Neapolitan coast, in this immersive historical mystery from #1 international bestselling author Tara Moss
Pacific Ocean, 1907. A girl embarks on a journey to begin a new life far from home.
Naples, 1943. A woman shelters underground from a wartime air raid, praying her husband will return home.
Sydney, 1948. Billie Walker, returned from a stint as a wartime investigative journalist, uncovers a dusty box in her father’s old office whose contents—correspondence with a woman on the other side of the world—just might explain how they all are connected.
Plunged into a perilous search that will take her onto the first postwar luxury passenger ship to sail across the ocean to Italy, Billie finds herself up against a dangerous adversary—someone with a mysterious grudge against her family—as she races to uncover the secrets her father left behind. And as the trail leads her towards two women whose histories may be entwined with her own, she realizes that her father’s Italian secret just might upend everything she thought she knew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian PI Billie Walker makes game-changing family discoveries in the entertaining third installment of this historical mystery series from Moss (after The Ghosts of Paris). In 1948 Sydney, Billie is helping Darlene Elliott divorce her abusive, philandering husband by proving his infidelity. Then, while rearranging her late father's filing cabinets, Billie stumbles on £500 and a packet of love letters from an Italian woman she's never heard of. Stunned, she books passage on a luxury cruise to Naples—ostensibly to relax, but also to investigate the possibility that her father was having an affair. Just before the SS Luxor sets sail, Darlene Elliott dies mysteriously, and Billie blames her archnemesis, Vincenzo Moretti, whose backstory turns out to cut much closer to Billie's own than she realized. Moss manages to keep her copious plot threads from getting tangled, and she supplements the action with sumptuous period fashion and simmering romance. (The love triangle between Billie; her assistant, Sam; and Sydney detective inspector Hank Cooper, while lopsided, is inspired.) If some of the tale's feminist rhetoric feels flown in from the future, it only enhances the enjoyable sense of wish fulfillment. Moss's fans won't be disappointed.
