Washoe County Library System

The story begins in 1962. On the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies a tall, thin woman approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, an American starlet, and she is dying. and the story begins again today when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studios back lot, searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

In his time investigating crimes for both the Boston cops and General Ike's European forces, Lieutenant Billy Boyle hasn't encountered a serial killer. But now it looks like he may--a serial killer with a particularly frightening agenda.

Lamour Harrington decides to leave her Chicago home and career behind to return to the Italy of her childhood. Nico Pirata, the heir to the Castello Pirata, sweeps her off her feet. But why does his father Lorenzo hate a woman he only ever knew as an innocent child? As Lorenzo plots to make Lamour leave Amalfi forever, long-hidden secrets come to dangerous life again.

"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar--a dazzling new novel that extends the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, into unexpected (and completely stand-alone) territory. Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naive girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a...

Arturo Clemente is sloppily murdered in his Roman apartment by a mysterious slasher. Police inspector Alec Blume has a favorite suspect, but the investigation is already being manipulated by both the Senate and the Fusco crime ring. As the details of the case continue to trickle out, Blume soon realizes he is being watched from on high--and that solving this crime may be the least of his worries. As the mob tightens its grip on the city, and with...

"When Anna, now living in California, is contacted by the Italian lover she knew decades before, she recalls their affair and the child she gave up for adoption. As the episode returns to haunt her--threatening the life she's built, including her marriage--the story moves back in time to her youth in Europe. Rome, 1979. Anna, twenty-two and living abroad, is involved with a man already engaged to be married. When she meets and befriends his fiancée,...