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Learn moreRick Montoya has just moved from Santa Fe to Rome, embracing the life of a translator. He's beginning to settle in to la dolce vita when school friend Beppo, now senior in the Italian Art Squad, recruits Rick for an unofficial undercover role. Armed with a list of galleries, suspects, and an expense account, Rick arrives in Tuscany posing as a buyer for a Santa Fe gallery to flush out traffickers in priceless burial urns.
However, before sunset on his first day in Volterra, the challenge intensifies. Rick has one quick conversation with a gallery employee who dies minutes later in a brutal fall from a high cliff. Has the trade in fraudulent artifacts upgraded to murder? Are the traffickers already on to Rick?
The local commissario and his team consider Rick an amateur and, worse, a foreigner. Plus Rick is a suspect in what proves to be the dead man's murder. While the Volterra squad pursues its leads, Rick continues to interview his list: a museum director, a top gallery owner, a low-profile import-export businessman and his enterprising color-coordinated assistant, a sensuous heiress with a private art specialty and clientele. When Rick's girlfriend Erica, an art history professor, arrives from Rome to visit him, she rekindles a friendship with an alluring, maybe dangerous, acquaintance. Has Rick's role made him the target of both cops and criminals?
David P. Wagner, a retired Foreign Service officer, spent nine years in Milan and Rome during his career and now writes tourist materials about Italy and mystery novels set in Italy.
David Colacci is an actor and director and Earphones Award–winning narrator.
Reviews
“Wagner hits all the right notes in this debut. His likable protagonist engages, plus the Italian angle is always appealing. Perfect for readers who enjoy a complex puzzle, a bit of humor, and a fairly gentle procedural. Don’t miss this one.”
“An American translator finds danger and excitement helping a Roman friend crack a ring of art thieves…Like the Etruscan urns he seeks, Rick’s debut is well-proportioned and nicely crafted.”
“David P. Wagner gives us a compelling new character in a setting so romantic and redolent of history it pulls us in immediately and holds us until the surprising ending…This is a wonderful start to a series, which should have immediate legs, and surely will thrill everyone who has lived in Italy, been to Italy, or would like to visit. As a boy I lived in both Firenze and Napoli, and reading Wagner takes me back deeply and instantly.”
“If you are interested in Italian art and artifacts, Italian history and culture, Italian food and wine, or even just good storytelling, then Cold Tuscan Stone—the first in what will hopefully become a series of Rick Montoya Italian mysteries—will be right up your cobblestone alleyway. Set in the ancient Tuscan town of Volterra, David P. Wagner’s atmospheric debut novel delivers all of the above and more…Simply put, this exciting, intriguing, well-written mystery extends an offer no reader should refuse. Capiche?”
“The intriguing art milieu, mouthwatering cuisine, and the team of the ironic Conti and the bemused but agile Montoya are bound to attract fans.”
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