A police mystery in the acclaimed series set in Florence, Italy: “Nabb is so good she’s awesome” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
Two foreign girls are abducted from a Florence piazza in broad daylight. The unusual March snowfall has distracted everyone—even Marshal Guarnaccia, who is unsure of what he has actually witnessed.
Then one of the girls turns up in a village in the Chianti, claiming the kidnappers have released her to propose a ransom for the other victim. But the marshal thinks she’s lying. Besides, Italian law forbids paying ransom to criminals, so the marshal must find the missing girl before her kidnappers decide to end her life—in this novel in the series that has been called “crime fiction at its best” (The Sunday Times).
“A masterpiece.” —Georges Simenon, author of the Inspector Maigret series
Magdalen Nabb was born in Lancashire and trained as a potter. In 1975, she left her old life behind and moved with her son to Florence, where she knew no one and even though she didn't speak any Italian, but where she fell in love with the local setting. Her Marshal Guarnaccia series, which has been translated into ten languages, was inspired by a real local marshal she befriended in the tiny pottery town of Montelupo Fiorentino. Nabb wrote children's fiction and crime novels until her death in 2007.