Sandro Cellini

Sandro Cellini, P. I., Florence's answer to Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti, returns in this atmospheric mystery set in a forbidding castle. As Sandro Cellini comes to grips with the tough realities of life as a private detective, touting for business among old contacts and following errant teenagers, an old case comes back to haunt him. Once the subject of a routine background check back in Sandro's earliest days as a private investigator, the glamorous, charming, and ruthless Loni Meadows, the director of an American-Italian artistic retreat in a castle in the hills outside Florence, goes off the icy road in her car one night. The circumstances of her death seem less than accidental to Sandro. However inconvenient his suspicions might be, both to Sandro-whose marriage appears to be disintegrating in the aftermath of his wife's illness-and to Meadows's erstwhile employers, the detective presses on. As he attempts to uncover the truth of Meadows's violent and lonely death, Sandro finds himself drawn into the lives of the castle's highly strung community and the closed world they inhabit in the isolated Etruscan hills of the Maremma. Reminiscent of a locked-room mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, A Murder in Tuscany leads the reader from one possible perpetrator to the next; to Sandro's chagrin, all of the artists in residence at the time of Loni's demise had more than enough reason to dislike her. But, who in the group had the most compelling motive to want her dead? Kent is a masterful investigator of character and mood, and her second mystery conveys the gloom of the Orfeo castle as well as the individual dark lives of its inhabitants in a chilling, memorable way.

Every August, Florence shimmers in the summer heat. But this year the heatwave is fiercer than usual, and the city's inhabitants have fled to the cool of the hills and beaches of the surrounding countryside. So, it is no surprise that amidst the shrubbery of a normally busy roundabout, a corpse lies unnoticed, bloating in the humid air. Sandro Cellini will not be joining the crowds of holidaymakers this year. The former policeman turned private detective has a case: a man who seems to have vanished into thin air-leaving his pregnant young wife alone in the city. Meanwhile, bank teller Roxana Delfino is also stuck in the city for the season, with nothing to do but worry for her aging mother and puzzle over the disappearance of one her regular clients. As all Florence sweats it out, Cellini attempts as best he can to grapple with his case and the complications it throws up. And when the weather finally breaks, it brings with it a shocking revelation...

When private investigator Sandro Cellini is invited to attend a glamorous launch party for a luxury residence overlooking the glittering expanse of Florence, he has no idea what he's walking into. Behind the ancient and luxurious facade of Palazzo San Giorgio, there lies a series of terrible secrets; an old torture chamber, hidden for centuries in the bowels of the building, and a much more recent malevolence. The former head of security for this elite development has just died under suspicious circumstances and Sandro finds himself-quite literally-stepping into dead man's shoes. He soon discovers that other unsavory incidents have tainted the prestigious opening. When one of the residents is found murdered in her room, events begin to spiral out of control. Sandro must work to untangle the complex web of relationships that exists between residents and staff to unmask a deadly killer, in this superb new Florentine mystery by Christobel Kent.

Meet Sandro Cellini, Florence's answer to Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti. One wet November in Florence, the grieving widow of an eminent Jewish architect comes to visit Sandro Cellini, good husband, disgraced ex-policeman, and recently turned PI, to ask him to investigate her husband's suicide. Cellini takes her on out of sympathy, although this first case makes a downbeat start to his new career. There seems no doubt that Claudio Gentileschi, a Holocaust survivor and lifelong depressive found drowned on a bleak stretch of the River Arno, did take his own life, and initially Cellini imagines that his only duty is to support the widow through her time of mourning. But as Cellini doggedly retraces the architect's last hours through the worst rains since the devastating floods of 1966, a young Englishwoman is found to have gone missing from the city's community of hard-drinking, high-living art students, and Sandro's search turns abruptly into something grimmer and more urgent than he could have imagined, as he uncovers a network of greed and corruption that is hidden under a veneer of tradition and refinement. The Drowning River is a spot-on, atmospheric new mystery, the first in a series featuring Cellini.