DEATH ON THE GRAND CANAL

In Monnin’s whodunit, a rookie Interpol agent must unwrap the mysteries of a missing golden peacock, a pile of inconvenient bodies, and the past life of her new lover.

Stefanie Adams is a new member of Interpol’s Artifact Recovery Team, and Contessa Giuliana Bergamo is the wealthy scion of a fading Italian aristocracy. The contessa is looking to sell a piece of art to the highest bidder: specifically, a long-lost 15th-century pendant known as the Borgia Peacock. Stefanie aims to win the auction and return it to Milan’s Sforza Castle. She arrives at the contessa’s home in Venice on the eve of the Regata Storica, a masquerade ball on boats. Stefanie’s not the only one hoping to purchase the item, and after first offers are made, bidders start dying; one is stabbed in the throat with a steampunk-ish plague mask and another killed with a gold-handled letter opener. Stefanie’s almost crushed by runaway aluminum beer kegs while buying frittellas. In the chaos, the Borgia Peacock goes missing. Meanwhile, Thomas Burkhardt—who recruited Stefanie into this new career and proposed to her in the first series installment, Death in the Aegean (2022)—seems strangely close to the contessa’s great-niece Francesca, a potential murder suspect. Monnin places Stefanie’s relationship questions in the center of a sinuous plot with confident, clean prose studded with telling details that set scenes and act as clues. Situations drive the plot and build character, as when Stefanie’s challenged to identify differences between 15th-century jewels and 19th-century copies, or in her response to the aforementioned keg attack, after which she jokes about her crushed hat: “I think my fedora is ready for Last Rites.” If there’s a fault in this multifaceted jewel, it’s that Stefanie seems to wait for her own hero to act—but the author snaps her back to the real story, in which Stefanie’s the hero and performs admirably, despite her doubts. Solving a crime isn’t the same as solving a relationship, of course, but what makes this structure interesting is that the main mystery that’s Stefanie’s solving is herself.

A romantic mystery that re-energizes its genre.