This image is the cover for the book Last Gondola, The Mysteries of Venice

Last Gondola, The Mysteries of Venice

Investigating a few lost trinkets, Urbino Macintyre discovers a mysterious murder

Samuel Possle is Venice’s oldest expatriate, a reclusive former playboy whose hedonistic youth would make the perfect subject for a book—that is, if any writer could make him talk. Biographer and amateur sleuth Urbino Macintyre has been trying for months to get an interview with Possle, and he is about to give up when his closest friend, the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini, offers to introduce him to Possle in exchange for a favor. Worthless items have gone missing from her home, and she wants Macintyre to find out if they were stolen or if her mind is beginning to slip. What appears to be an innocuous case will lead Macintyre down a treacherous canal.

Interviewing Possle and searching for the contessa’s missing baubles draws the detective into the city’s gothic underbelly, where dark figures seem to lurk around every corner, and the fog conceals terrible secrets.

Edward Sklepowich

Edward Sklepowich is an American author of mysteries. Raised in Connecticut, he grew up living with his parents and his grandparents, who immersed him in Italian culture and Neapolitan dialect from a young age. A Fulbright scholarship took him to Europe and Africa, and he has made his home across the Mediterranean, living in Venice, Naples, Egypt, and Tunisia. Deeply connected to his Italian heritage, Sklepowich has used the country as the setting for all of his fiction.

Sklepowich’s debut novel, Death in a Serene City (1990), introduced Urbino Macintyre, an American expatriate and amateur sleuth who undertakes to solve a Venetian murder. Sklepowich treats Venice as a character, using its ancient atmosphere to shape his classically structured mysteries. He has written eight more Mysteries of Venice—most recently, The Veils of Venice (2009).

Open Road Integrated Media