Customer Reviews

City of Silver (Thorndike Press Large Print Historical Fiction)

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Riches always come with a cost and so many a story of a mining boomtown
is filled with crime, greed, harsh conditions, and the inevitable bust
once the treasure is mined out.

And so we find ourselves living the story of a mining town, but not on
the Western frontier. "City of Silver" takes readers to the seventeenth
century setting of Peru under the heavy hand of Spanish rule. Potosi,
now in modern-day Bolivia, was once the richest city in the New World
due to its silver mines, a fabulous source of wealth giving rise to the
wishful dubbing of subsequent American mining towns by the same name.

Racial tensions between the Spanish and the natives simmer hot and the
Protestant reformation threatens Catholic strength. Besides that,
alarming rumors of counterfeit coins, thus violating confidence in
Potosi's wealth and threatening Spain's economic power, cause further
unrest in the city. The King of Spain, in fact, is so disturbed at the
news that he's sending a Grand Inquisitor to investigate, striking fear
into both loyal citizens and criminals alike. And then Mother Maria
Santa Hilda, Abbess of the local convent, opens her door to Inez Rojas
de la Morada, daughter of one of the town's most powerful men. Inez
refuses to speak of her reasons for seeking sanctuary, and shortly after
Maria Santa Hilda finds her dead, in a locked room: suicide or murder?

Uncovering old secrets and the dark side of Potosi's fabulous wealth is
a dangerous proposition--some things are easier left buried. The mystery
of Inez's death and life plays out against the mystery of the
counterfeit coins, the two stories neatly intersecting as Maria Santa
Hilda stubbornly pursues her inquiry with the gumption of a true PI,
though her duty to her order and her bishop frequently wars with her
duty to the truth. Skillful incorporation of the religious, sexual,
racial, and political aspects of life--and for the non-Spanish, non-male,
non-Catholic, or non-wealthy, they could be pretty grim--at that time
give "City of Silver" an authentic historical feel, and the unusual
period setting gives this mystery a distinction all its own. Life in the
rarified air of the Andes four hundred years ago may have been quite
different, but we see that greed and murder, and thus human nature,
rarely change.

Inez de la Morada is the daughter of Francisco Morada, the Mayor of Potosi. Potosi is a city of many riches. Inez has found the man she wants to marry. Her father disapproves of her choice. Inez seeks shelter at the convent, Santa Isabella de los Santos Milagros. Mother Abbess Maria Santa Hilda takes a liking to Inez and watches over her. When Mother Abbess Maria goes to check up on Inez, she finds the young woman dead. Inez's death does not go unnoticed, especially when her father is the Mayor. Soon Mother Abbess Maria finds herself in the middle of an investigation that has people looking at her as the prime suspect. She must learn the truth about Inez's death before it is too late.

City of Silver is Annamaria Alfieri's debut novel. She really made the characters come alive in this book. The only issue I had was there were so many characters coming at me very fast at the beginning and this translated to me having a bit of a problem keeping all the various people apart. From the beginning the reader knows what really happened to Inez. What I did enjoy through was seeing how this story would play out. It reminded me of a Spanish soap opera. The vivid picture Ms. Alfieri painted for me was so rich in culture that I could excuse getting a little lost. If you are looking for something new to read than give City of Silver a try, it just might sparkle for you.

In 1650, Spanish King Felip IV is concerned with a flood of impure silver coins that threatens the very foundation of the empire. He sends the Visitador General Doctor Francisco de Nestares to Potosi, the largest city in the New World and the center of silver production to investigate and execute those coining the counterfeits.

At the same time in Potosi, Inez Rojas de la Morada, daughter of the Alcalde Municipal, apparently commits suicide while inside an abbey. The New Spain Grand Inquisitor Fray Perdro de la Gasca sees an opportunity to strengthen his control; he blames the abbess Mother Maria Santa Hilda. He calls her a heretic because she was allowing Inez to be interred in holy ground. Not one to sit idly by, Mother Maria sets out to prove that Inez was a murder victim and did not take her life. Her inquiry uncovers implications that some of her people are involved in the watering down of the silver.

This is a great mid seventeenth century historical fiction that grips the audience from the moment the Spanish monarch sends his "investigator" to New Spain and never slows down as the tale turns into an exhilarating amateur sleuth with a clock ticking. Revelations abound that stun the Mother Superior while the Visitador General and the New Spain Grand Inquisitor do their respective jobs. The mystery is cleverly done to entertain readers with strong competing inquiries pulled by personal agendas; in which the truth may prove irrelevant but even more so to provide a deep vivid look at the biggest city in the seventeenth century New World. Awesome Annamaria Alfieri will be fully welcomed by the genre.

Harriet Klausner

Annamaria Alfieri's CITY OF SILVER is an historical mystery that tells a story that is contemporary in the revelations of the things that move men, and women, to do the worst to each other.

CITY OF SILVER is two stories. The first begins with the death of Inez de la Morada who has fled to the local convent, pleading for sanctuary. She refuses to tell the Abbess from what she is fleeing but she insists that the convent is the only place she will be safe. Inez is the daughter of the richest and most powerful man in Potosi, Alcalde de la Morada, the leader of the community. Why is Inez, the cherished daughter, hiding from the father who treated her as the son he never had? Inez insists that she wants to join the religious order to atone for the sins of the world. Abbess Maria Santa Hilda isn't convinced of Inez's motives but they are quickly irrelevant when Inez is found dead in her locked cell. There are no marks on her body and nothing unusual in the room. There is a partially empty glass of water and a flagellum similar to that used by all the nuns to mortify the flesh but nothing that explains the sudden death of a healthy young woman.

It is Holy Week, so Inez must be buried quickly and without the pomp that would normally surround the death of a member of the city's most prominent family. Inez's father agrees to have her buried with the deceased nuns of the order in the church. Soon, rumors spread that Inez committed suicide, leaving the Abbess open to the dangers of the Inquisition for having broken church law by allowing a suicide to be buried in consecrated ground. The king's representative for the Inquisition gloats at the possibility of bringing down the Abbess who has allowed women to learn to read and write and to believe that they have a greater role than Spanish society grants them.

Inez's father has problems of his own. The silver mines of Potosi have been sending coins to the king's coffers in Spain that have been adulterated with alloy. The face value is not the real value and this is a threat to the Spanish economy and its dominance in the Americas. The king's investigator is coming to demand answers but it is far more concerning that papers that would label Morada a traitor are missing from the secret compartment in his desk.

Greed, corruption, jealousy, fear, arrogance, and hate motivate the actions of most of the male figures in the story. And while the women are not above these same faults, CITY OF SILVER is a story of strong women. "...Maria Santa Hilda knew well Fray DaTriesta's distaste for the company of women....he never looked her in the face. He cleaved to the conviction of many priests - that women were the source of all evil. It was true, she thought petulantly, if you considered that women were the source of all men." DaTriesta's hate of the abbess leads to her arrest and trial by the Inquisitor but it doesn't stop Sor Monica, the herbalist at the convent, from risking her life and freedom to prove how Inez died so that the Abbess can be freed from the machinery of the church.

The story is set in 1650 in a society that does not accord women any right to control their lives. Everyone, male and female, no matter what their station, are in perpetual danger from the Inquisition where truth is ignored and power is used for its own sake. The circumstances are not relevant to women in the 21st century, but each of the women in the story can be found among the women we know in our own lives.

The writing is colorful, the descriptions vivid. I came to the book knowing nothing about Peru in the 17th century and learned a great deal but learned it as background to a story about greed and the manipulation of power no matter who holds that power. The story could be lifted from the 17th century and, by changing the details of time and place, could be a story set anytime, anywhere. But it wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable.

Annamaria Alfieri has created a tale of mystery and intrigue, but more interestingly for me, a tale of life as it was really lived by the Conquistadors once they settled in. Money corrupts,and this was as true in the 17th century as it is today. Potosi is a city in Peru built on a mountain of silver, used to coin Spanish currency. The people are deeply religious, but that doesn't extend to generosity or justice for the Indians who go down into the deep mines, sometimes never returning. The book is a classic murder mystery, but I loved the background--the clothes, the life, the power and fear of the Inquisition, the greed. This is a great read!

[...]
No city on Earth is closer to heaven. Huddled some 13,000 feet above sea level, amid the salt flats and plateaus of what is now southwestern Bolivia, Potosí crouches at the foot of Cerro Rico, a low-slung mountain once famed for its silver deposits. Today, the depleted mountain presides over a town of tin miners and restored chapels, but 400 years ago, it crowned the wealthiest metropolis in the Western Hemisphere.

In her vibrant debut thriller, "City of Silver," New York writer Annamaria Alfieri resurrects Potosí's 17th-century heyday, when "even their maids wore gold on their chests and pearls embroidered on their sleeves. . . . Wealth was the reason for this city's existence, and its citizens flaunted all they had. . . . Their city had dominated the economic life of the planet for nearly a century." Chief among the hedonists is de facto mayor Francisco Morada, who disdains his louche wife, Ana, but dotes on their wild-child daughter Inez. After the girl absconds to the Convent of Santa Isabella de los Santos Milagros and begs the skeptical abbess to admit her as a novitiate, Morada threatens the order with ruin.

Mortality, ever obliging, soon interferes: On Good Friday, with the Morada household still riven by her flight, the nuns discover Inez's pristine corpse on the floor of her cell, flail and rosary coiled beside her, a shattered carafe near her hand. The abbess dismisses the notion of a natural death: "Otherwise-healthy young women do not drop dead of heart failure," she observes. What about suicide? But if Inez "destroyed herself," her body cannot rest in holy ground; interment there would endanger the abbess's standing with the local commissioner of the Inquisition. A perfect murder, then? "Who in this convent would take another's life?" the nuns wonder. Meanwhile, the king of Spain has dispatched an emissary to investigate impurities in the Potosino currency, a mission that could render Potosí "nothing but an imitation Spanish city in the most desolate spot on earth."



Densely brocaded with period detail, "City of Silver" reads like an El Doradan "Name of the Rose," all cloistered intrigue and New World decadence; it recalls too Ron Hansen's lyric masterpiece, "Mariette in Ecstasy," in which a gorgeous young postulant bewitches her fellow brides of Christ. Yet Alfieri evokes a past, place and people that are altogether sui generis. Her Potosí is replete with virgins and voluptuaries, political rivalries and caste tensions; her stately, wrought-iron prose paces galloping action sequences and intimate exchanges alike; her solution, though lifted wholesale from Umberto Eco, is no less ingenious for it. As both history and mystery, "City of Silver" glitters.

"Potosi had a Spanish soul: proud, greedy, cruel, and noble. It had beauty. Grandeur. Chaos."

Potosi is the location of Alfieri's terrific historical mystery, "City of Silver". This murder mystery is set in 1650 in the then Peruvian city nestled against a silver-rich mountain that made the city one of the wealthiest places in not only the new world, but the entire world.

The story revolves around the discovery of girl found dead in a room of a convent. She's naked, the door is locked, there's no other entrance, and no apparent cause of death. Threaded through this mystery is the arrival of the King's emissary investigating whether the coinage produced at Potosi is being blended with lesser metals. Not only could this spell financial disaster for the Potosi community, but the church's representative of the Inquisition in New Spain is arriving as well.

While things may seem a bit melodramatic, the story pulls together very very well. Alfieri's world is vividly reproduced, and maintains a genuinely New World feel. She absolutely nails the tone and voice of the era. There are shades of Gary Jennings' New World in Alfier's Potosi, and the characters are strongly built, but not as boldly as Jennings' worlds of the Aztec.

The characters are strong and familiar. Padre Junipero and Abbess Maria are both bastions of the religious communities in Potosi, but have deep seated dark secrets that led them to the Church and led them to this city far from their homes in native Spain. The local representative of the church's Inquisition is full of bile and takes irredeemable joy in sending sinners to the auto de fe. Cliched, perhaps, but the character development moves at an appropriate pace and, with only one exception, did I find their back stories conclude less dramatically than foreshadowed.

I have no reservations in recommending this read to fans of both historical fiction and historical mysteries.

This historical wonderfully depicts seventeenth-century Potosi and its religious, cultural, and political tensions through well-developed characters. A terrific read.

A fast paced intellectual read. There are those authors who respect the intelligence of their reader. Annamaria Alfieri is such an author. In a style that brings to mind Isabel Allende, Alfieri weaves a literary mystery set in 1650 Peru, yet, deals with issues as current as today's headlines. Her characters are well rounded and gradually unfold to us with every intriguing turn of the page. And she accomplishes this without the annoying habit some writers have of constantly repeating what the reader already knows.

Annamaria Alfieri builds on the foundation of City of Silver, a strong, captivating first novel. Well Done!

M.S White

This was an engrossing historical mystery, filled with interesting details and suspense. A fine read.