THE MEDICI MURDERS

An English archivist retired to Venice gets sucked into a 500-year-old murder case.

TV historian Sir Marmaduke Godolphin, who hasn’t had a hit series in years, doesn’t think 75 is too old for a comeback. So he leaps at the news that Grigor Wolff, an antiquarian who’s followed him appreciatively for years, has died and left him the Wolff Bequest, 13 trunks of papers that may throw dazzling new light on the assassinations of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici in 1537 and Lorenzino de’ Medici, the cousin long presumed to be his killer, 11 years later. Puffed up with anticipatory pride, Godolphin supplements the family circle including his wife, producer and former student, Lady Felicity, and his son, Jolyon, by gathering once more the Gilded Circle of academics he taught at Cambridge—Caroline Fitzroy, Bernard Hauptmann, and George Bourne—and he commissions Luca Volpetti of the State Archives and his recently widowed friend Arnold Clover to sift through the Wolff Bequest looking for two telltale papers that implicate Lodovico Buonarroti, better known as Michelangelo, in the killings. Are the letters describing the dagger the artist fashioned as a murder weapon and his participation in one of the murders genuine? Are they clever forgeries designed to fool modern readers? Or are they even more devious forgeries designed to be seen through? Before he can confront these questions, Godolphin himself is killed, leaving Clover and Capitano Valentina Fabbri to get to the bottom of a very deep well that promises surprising confessions about crimes long past and present.

Not for dilettantes, but serious history buffs are in for a treat.