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Shop nowThe Dead Season
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Every August, Florence shimmers in the summer heat, but this year the heat wave 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 amid the shrubbery of a normally busy roundabout, a corpse lies unnoticed, bloating in the humid air.
Sandro Cellini, meanwhile, 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. Bank teller Roxana Delfino is also stuck in the city for the season with nothing to do but worry about her aging mother and puzzle over the disappearance of one of 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 at him. And when the weather finally breaks, it brings with it a shocking revelation.
Christobel Kent was born in LondonĀ and grew up in London and Essex, including a stint on the Essex coast on a Thames barge with three siblings and four step-siblings, before reading English at Cambridge. She has worked in publishing and TEFL teaching and has lived inĀ Florence andĀ Modena, Italy. She has written several novels set in Italy and now lives in Cambridge with her husband and five children.
Geoffrey Howard (a.k.a. Ralph Cosham) (1936ā2014) was a British journalist who changed careers to become a narrator and screen and stage actor. He performed in more than one hundred professional theatrical roles. His audiobook narrations were named āAudio Best of the Yearā by Publishers Weekly, and he won seven AudioFile Earphones Awards, and in 2013 he won the coveted Audie Award for Best Mystery Narration for his reading of Louise Pennyās The Beautiful Mystery.
Reviews
āI loved this book and hated putting it down. It manages to be both a taut thriller and a beautifully observed story of a young womanās coming-of-age set in a Florence in full flood. Michael Dibdin meets Muriel Spark.ā
āFlorence is still in good hands, entrusted to a private investigator named Sandro Cellini, who keeps a wary eye on the ancient city in a string of mysteries by Christobel Kentā¦The Dead Season isnāt the first book in this series, but itās a terrific introduction to the intractable problems of a modern-day city plagued by illegal immigrants, an exhausted economy, and a broken system of government.ā
āBritish author Kentās excellent third novel featuring the Italian PIā¦Kent brings her characters to rich and convincing life amid story lines full of subtlety and surprise. Florence, too, springs vividly from the page, evoked with sharp observation and an admirable absence of clichĆ©. Kentās reputation as a writer of smart, atmospheric mysteries with literary as well as genre appeal should continue to grow.ā
āAugust is the dead season in Florence, when the streets are empty of all but the most determined tourists and all but the unluckiest Florentines, those unable to escape on vacationā¦The alternating points of view between private eye and bank teller and the glimpses we get into their domestic struggles prove intriguing.ā
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