Customer Reviews

Deadly Paradise

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Grace Brophy's "A Deadly Paradise" is an intricate and exceptionally well spun crime yarn set in Umbria and Venice with a side trip to Urbino. The locations are important to the story as the author wisely weaves in local color to punch up the plot and clarify the character sketches.

Brophy's police comissario protagonist, Alessandro Cenni, is an interesting personality, very much in keeping with the cynical but idealistic cops that star in Donna Leon, Michael Dibdin and Andrea Camillieri's Italian crime novels. Cenni has an alter ego--a twin brother, who is a Catholic Bishop seemingly destined for big things in the Vatican.

But what is most creative about "A Deadly Paradise" is the unfolding story of the principal murder victim of the piece, Jarvinia Baudler, a German woman with such a bizarre history of evil doing that the wonder is that she lived to the age of 77 before she was beaten to death by someone who had finally had enough.

A rich cast of other offbeat characters--a dotty and nasty Venetian Contessa, a larger than life village gossip, a cat-loving diehard Italian Communist, to name but a few--also populate this story to its benefit. Author Brophy attempts to dazzle the reader with this array of wild players and uncountable numbers of red herrings as well to hold our interest with an unusually credible plot. She succeeds across the board, in my opinion.

My only qualm with this well-done book is the slightly irrelevant and therefore less credible pursuit of a lost love by protagonist Cenni. It all may well be explained in the next book in the series, but in "A Deadly Paradise," it seemed a bit tacked on, without a purpose to the book's main story line.

A Deadly Paradise is Brophy's fascinating sequel to her bravura debut The Last Enemy, and here we follow Alessandro Cenni through the complex alleyways and back canals of Venice and of the Umbrian political scene to solve a diplomatic case of grisly murder and mutilation. The German-born murder victim, Jarvinia Baudler, is a nasty piece of work with diplomatic connections, a shady sexual history, and a dubious past connected with a post-war Italian family of a girlhood friend of hers. Aside from the mystery's wry and riveting social commentary on life in current-day Bell' Italia, we also get a tantalizing whiff of the love interest that had led the handsome and committed Cenni into his investigative career. (This reader is ready for more than a whiff in the next Cenni mystery!) Layers of complication, atmosphere, social nuance, and a palette of intriguingly wierd suspects make this a must-read.

Chiara, a woman leaning into the wind, pressed against the railing of a crowded waterbus on a Venetian canal, her straight black hair falling across the angry scar on her beautiful face, is a haunting presence in the second of Grace Brophy's Commissario Cenni series, A Deadly Paradise. She was the woman Cenni loved for her laughter and her irreverence, the woman he believed had been murdered twenty years earlier, and the reason he turned to police work. Deftly drawn, Chiara reappears at the heart of the book, and Cenni's search for the killers of a German-born cultural attache who knew too many secrets in occupied Venice during World War II is entwined with his search for her.

Reading about Cenni's investigations is a little like walking through a portrait gallery in a dark and cavernous Venetian palazzo, where characters step out of paintings with all their eccentricities and malice. Harboring long held hatreds, they connive with murderous intent. The settings are evocative, the politics intriguing. The murder takes place in a quiet Umbrian village, conjuring up the brutal murders of a mother and child in the same place fifty years earlier. It is a village where everyone knows each other's business but no one wants to dredge up the past.

When the latest murder victim, a selfish and egotistical expert on Renaissance art, discovers that vast sums of counterfeit money missing since the war were used to buy art after the fighting ended, she blackmails everyone involved, who would all like to see her dead. But they're not the only ones--friends she betrayed thirst for revenge; her secretary hates her; her landlord is trying to evict her and the neighbors want her out. In pursuing the killer, Cenni struggles with higher ranking police officers who would prefer not to solve the crime if that would mean raking over delicate post-war relations between Italy and Germany or embarrassing government officials. The investigation also fuels competition within Cenni's department, and gender issues faced by women officers determined to prove themselves.

From the Umbrian countryside to decaying Venetian palazzos, vividly described and drenched in atmosphere, Cenni digs for clues, a fading photograph, a cracked periwinkle dish, racing toward the last crescendo on a fourth floor balcony with a precipitous drop to the valley below. Throughout, the precision and wit of the writing is delectable, and Cenni's love for Chiara gives the mystery a tantalizing hint of romance.

What a swell, artfully complicated, beautifully characterized murder mystery! The peaceful village setting in the Umbrian hills intensifies the twists and turns and violence of the tale while Inspector Cenni, Brophy's handsome, melancholy,sports-loving police detective, must pit his wits and experience not only against an unknown murderer but his own superior as well. (I loved the brief encounter with Cenni's mom and her circle of "moneyed matrons in competition with one another.") The more we find out about Jarvinia, the murder victim, the less we like her. And the exchange of letters at the center is brilliant,moving the narrative and giving an added perspective to some very interesting characters. The story gets more and more riveting as the labyrinth is illuminated with partial explanation. "A Deadly Paradise" is a dark puzzle, well crafted, and a terrific read. I hope Grace Brophy keeps 'em coming!

In Paradiso, Italy, Inspector Alessandro Cenni investigates the murder of Jarvinia Baudler. However, the dedicated detective finds the case irritatingly difficult and complicated by the victim's lover German Dieter Reimann, a diplomat with all that interfering immunity. Dieter has interests in the victim beyond the murder of a lover or his own role as a prime suspect; the late Jarvinia has papers of his that he must regain or face some dire consequences and no dumb Italian cop is going to get in his way of retrieving them.

Cenni soon realizes that Baudler was bisexual and took advantage of Reimann's stupidity. She used her connection to him to create fake passports and live wealthy on credit. The inspector also learns someone was sending the deceased threatening letters. However, the inquiry takes a Venice spin when cold case murders from three decades ago tie back to Baudler, the diplomat and his wife.

The latest Cenni Italian police procedural (see THE LAST ENEMY) is an engaging case with an incredible setup. Cenni is at his best as he struggles with diplomatic immunity intruding on the crime scene. Although the ending is reasonable, it feels less than equal to Cenni's investigation into the fatal triangle. Still sub-genre fans will appreciate Grace Brophy's entertaining whodunit.

Harriet Klausner

Really disappointed in this book - meandering plot that changes direction constantly and is essentially way too much plot - unnecessary hyped up details that sex up the plot with dramatic details in an extremely silly way. (don't want to give them away, but there didn't seem to be a gimmick left out.) Fairly obvious ending after a series of red herrings. The author didn't seem to have organized her plot well - at times, it seemed like I had started a completely different novel. thought the first one was ok, but I won't be reading any more of this author.

Grace Brophy has written a densely crafted description of the people and customs of aristocrats and their entourage. Her detective, Cenni, is a real human with flaws as well as talent.

I enjoyed Grace Brophy's A Deadly Passion and found it to be a good murder mystery. The story was captivating and left me continually trying to pull the pieces together and narrow the suspects before the revelation at the end. Unlike some mysteries where the culprit is a complete surprise at the ending you are able to narrow the field and still have a slight twist at the end.

Most of the characters in the story are objectionable and seem to be on the fringe carrying enough physical, mental, and emotional baggage to easily be a murderer. The author presents a hodgepodge of odd characters that include everything from bisexual lovers, one of who's sexual proclivities include an incestuous relationship with her probable father, a staunch communist, a deformed tightwad landlord, a German diplomat whose adulterous affair makes him and his wife a suspect, and so on. All of these characters are counterbalanced by Inspector Cenni, who also prefers to be on the fringe within his profession. I believe Brophy has developed a strong character in Cenni that will be the lead in many books to follow.

Overall I enjoyed the book. If the sign of a good book is making you want more, this book delivered. I enjoyed it enough to pick up Brophy's "The Last Enemy" upon completion of reading this book and I look forward to Brophy's next Cenni book. Enough clues are left for you to make an assumption that Cenni's ex-lover may be the topic of her next book, but we'll wait and see. If not, the character seemed pretty irrelevant to the story line and oddly placed in this story.

One of the trends in recent years is the Italian mystery. I've somehow managed to avoid Donna Leon, the principal purveyor of these books (though I have her newest in my stack) and so I was curious to see what one of her imitators would look like. Grace Brophy is heralded with the announcement that fans of Leon will like this book too. OK, since I've never read Leon I figured this would be a good introduction.

The plot here wanders a bit at the start of the book. An expatriate German has been killed in rural northern Italy, beaten to death and horribly mutilated in her basement. She was an unpleasant woman, a lesbian who lorded it over everyone, lied and claimed diplomatic privaleges to which she was no longer entitled, and as the book goes on you discover other, even more objectionable things about her. As a result, there is a list of possible suspects that's quite long.

The detective is an Italian policeman named Alessandro Cenni. He has assistants (a married couple, oddly) and he is (of course) a maverick who doesn't play by the rules (shades of Craig Ferguson's stereotyped detective character from his monologues on late night television). Cenni moves through the suspects slowly, plodding and arguing with supervisors and subordinates, and there's an odd aura to the whole story, as if the main character is working on a puzzle and others are trying to help or hinder him on his way to a solution. Only at the end of the story is there a bit of suspense once it becomes apparent who the killer is.

This was an OK story, and I suppose others might like the puzzle aspect of things. I only thought it OK.