Karen
This is a good old fashioned melodramatic thriller set mostly in the fictional town of Ruffano, Italy. Armino Fabbio, a tour guide for a Genoan tour company, has a chance encounter with an old woman who reminds him of the nurse who took care of him as a child in Ruffano. When she is later murdered, he leaves his job and sets off for Ruffano to see if he can verify if it really was Marta, his old nurse. As he comes back to the town he left as an 11 year old boy in the chaos of the end of World War II, he is drawn into the intrigues between factions at the university that threaten to engulf the whole town, and he finds that his family drama is at the center of them.
I was instantly drawn in and read this compulsively in two sittings. The melodrama hit the spot. I especially appreciated the mirroring of the town's (fictional) historic drama between medieval Dukes Claudio and Carlo that is essential to the plot.
This is a good old fashioned melodramatic thriller set mostly in the fictional town of Ruffano, Italy. Armino Fabbio, a tour guide for a Genoan tour company, has a chance encounter with an old woman who reminds him of the nurse who took care of him as a child in Ruffano. When she is later murdered, he leaves his job and sets off for Ruffano to see if he can verify if it really was Marta, his old nurse. As he comes back to the town he left as an 11 year old boy in the chaos of the end of World War II, he is drawn into the intrigues between factions at the university that threaten to engulf the whole town, and he finds that his family drama is at the center of them.
I was instantly drawn in and read this compulsively in two sittings. The melodrama hit the spot. I especially appreciated the mirroring of the town's (fictional) historic drama between medieval Dukes Claudio and Carlo that is essential to the plot.