Last Enemy, A Commissario Cenni Investigation

Name: Last Enemy, A Commissario Cenni Investigation
Author: Grace Brophy

An American visits her relatives in Umbria, Italy—and soon turns up dead—in this series that “will please lovers of old-style deductive detective fiction” (Publishers Weekly).

Rita Minelli grew up in Brooklyn, the only child of a narcissistic Italian woman who married a GI at the end of World War II. After her mother’s death, Rita decides to quit her job and show up at the home of her aristocratic but cash-strapped relatives, the Count and Countess Casati, in Assisi.

It is a while before they realize—to their chagrin—that Rita has come to stay. But when the family assembles to watch the penitents’ procession in the town square during Easter Week, Rita does not join them as planned. Her corpse is later found in the family mausoleum.

Now Alessandro Cenni, a commissario in the state police of Umbria, must unearth the secrets of the Casati family and their circle if he is to discover who killed this unwanted houseguest, and why . . .

Grace Brophy

Born in New Jersey to Irish parents, Grace Brophy lived and worked as a teacher and systems engineer in New York City until 2001, when she and her late husband, figurative painter Miguel Peraza, traveled to Italy with their two cats. While still in Italy, she began The Last Enemy, her first work of fiction. Her second Commissario Cenni novel, A Deadly Paradise, is also published by Soho Press.