An entrancing story that is one of the most absorbing examinations of the English in Italy since A Room With A View. Set during one week in springtime Florence, A Party In San Niccolo follows the events leading up to the seventy-fifth birthday party for Frances Richardson, a much-loved English resident. Around her, Frances' friends are gearing up for the party too: Frank, a disenchanted journalist; Jane, who runs an Italian cookery school for rich Home Counties wives; her shady husband Niccolo; and Gina, a beleaguered mother-of-three who has come to Florence for a break. Before the week is out love, death, family secrets and old memories will come to a head at Frances' party, with dramatic results...

A Party in San Niccolo

Literature & Fiction

Kent, Christobel

Contemporary

Penguin??Books

'Suddenly, she felt the thrill of being in so foreign a place, far more foreign that she had expected; a place where anything might happen...' The restored Tuscan farmhouse on the edge of an ancient wood is the perfect setting for a late September holiday. As Justine Elliott, her friends and their families from university gather to relax and unwind, she hopes it will be a chance to put the most tragic events of the previous year behind them all. However, the apparently peaceful Italian countryside holds as many secrets as its visitors and, before the week is out, the past and the present will collide, with unexpected and dramatic results...

Late Season

Making a home, however, in the ravishing, haunted landscape of Italy's Riviera coast, turns out to be lonelier than Rose had anticipated. And it is only when she is asked to write a profile of one of her reclusive neighbours, the once-glamorous film star Elvira Vitale, that Rose feels her new life is really beginning.

The Summer House

Florentine Revenge

Penguin Uk

Meet Sandro Cellini, Florence’s answer to Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti. 
One wet November in Florence, the grieving widow of an eminent Jewish architect comes to visit Sandro Cellini, good husband, disgraced ex-policeman, and recently turned PI, to ask him to investigate her husband’s suicide. Cellini takes her on out of sympathy, although this first case makes a downbeat start to his new career. There seems no doubt that Claudio Gentileschi, a Holocaust survivor and lifelong depressive found drowned on a bleak stretch of the River Arno, did take his own life, and initially Cellini imagines that his only duty is to support the widow through her time of mourning. 
But as Cellini doggedly retraces the architect’s last hours through the worst rains since the devastating floods of 1966, a young Englishwoman is found to have gone missing from the city’s community of hard-drinking, high-living art students, and Sandro’s search turns abruptly into something grimmer and more urgent than he could have imagined, as he uncovers a network of greed and corruption that is hidden under a veneer of tradition and refinement. 
The Drowning River is a spot-on, atmospheric new mystery, the first in a series featuring Cellini.

The Drowning River: A Mystery in Florence (Sandro Cellini)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Minotaur Books

Sandro Cellini, P. I., Florence’s answer to Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti, returns in this atmospheric mystery set in a forbidding castle. As Sandro Cellini comes to grips with the tough realities of life as a private detective, touting for business among old contacts and following errant teenagers, an old case comes back to haunt him.
Once the subject of a routine background check back in Sandro’s earliest days as a private investigator, the glamorous, charming, and ruthless Loni Meadows, the director of an American-Italian artistic retreat in a castle in the hills outside Florence, goes off the icy road in her car one night. The circumstances of her death seem less than accidental to Sandro. However inconvenient his suspicions might be, both to Sandro—whose marriage appears to be disintegrating in the aftermath of his wife’s illness—and to Meadows’s erstwhile employers, the detective presses on. As he attempts to uncover the truth of Meadows’s violent and lonely death, Sandro finds himself drawn into the lives of the castle’s highly strung community and the closed world they inhabit in the isolated Etruscan hills of the Maremma. 
Reminiscent of a locked-room mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, A Murder in Tuscany leads the reader from one possible perpetrator to the next; to Sandro’s chagrin, all of the artists in residence at the time of Loni’s demise had more than enough reason to dislike her. But who in the group had the most compelling motive to want her dead? 
Kent is a masterful investigator of character and mood, and her second mystery conveys the gloom of the Orfeo castle as well as the individual dark lives of its inhabitants in a chilling, memorable way.

A Murder in Tuscany (Sandro Cellini)

"A taut psychological thriller, loaded with mood, and a puzzle tricky enough to keep you guessing to the final page" ―The Washington Post
In the chilling tradition of Daphne du Maurier and with the acuity of Kate Atkinson comes an atmospheric psychological thriller about an isolated British village and the sinister abandoned house that holds the key to its most shameful secrets.
Alison is as close to anonymous as you can get: she has no ties and no home, and her only anchors are her boyfriend and her small backroom job in publishing. Which is exactly how she wants it. Because once, Alison was a teenager named Esme who lived in a remote, dilapidated house by a bleak estuary with her parents and three siblings. One night something terrible happened in the family’s crooked house, leaving Alison the only survivor. In order to escape from the horror she witnessed, she moved away from the village, changed her name, and cut herself off from her past.
But now her boyfriend has invited her to a wedding being held in her old hometown, which means returning there for the first time since that night. She decides that she’s never going to overcome the trauma of what happened to her without confronting it, so she accepts his invitation. But soon Alison realizes that the events of that night left their awful mark not just on her but on the entire village, and she begins to suspect that everyone there might somehow be implicated in her family’s murder.
Christobel Kent’s The Crooked House is a haunting thriller about one woman’s search for the truth about her past through a closed community full of dark secrets.

The Crooked House: A Novel

Thrillers & Suspense

Sarah Crichton Books

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 
“Be careful, Fran,” the man said quietly. “About what you think you know.”
In a dilapidated farmhouse out in the vast waterlogged plains of the English Fenlands, Fran awakes groggily to her baby’s cries one February night and finds the bed empty beside her. Her husband, Nathan, is gone.
Moving uneasily through the drafty rooms, searching for her husband, Fran soon makes a devastating discovery that upends her marriage and any semblance of safety. As she tries desperately to make sense of what happened to Nathan, Fran is forced to delve dangerously into the undercurrents of his claustrophobic hometown and question how well she knew him in the first place. Fran, increasingly isolated, grows paranoid―but Nathan isn’t the only one hiding something. Though she can’t tell a soul, Fran is shielding a damning secret of her own: a hazy, dreamlike memory from the night of Nathan’s disappearance that might be the key to it all.
From the bestselling author of The Crooked House comes an utterly gripping psychological thriller spanning the traditions of Daphne du Maurier and S. J. Watson. Christobel Kent’s The Loving Husband is spooky and skillfully written, dragging readers deep into the unsettling world of the Fens and into a marriage of half-truths and past lives, where no one can be trusted―especially not your spouse.

The Loving Husband: A Novel

Genre Fiction

From Christobel Kent―whose psychological thrillers have been called “terrifyingly good,” “perfectly paced,” “addictive,” “tense, dense, extremely well-plotted and beautifully written”―a new nerve-racking novel about a disappeared barmaid and the friend who will do anything to find her. When Beth disappears, everyone says she’s run off with another man. She’s just a fly-by-night party girl who can’t be trusted. But Natalie, her best friend, doesn’t believe it, not at all. She’s sure something more sinister is going on. So sure that proving it just might kill her . . . 
Meanwhile, Victor, one of Beth’s and Nat’s favorite bar patrons, has fallen and ended up in the hospital. When he hears that Beth is gone, he doesn’t buy it either. And slowly, a hazy memory comes back to him. Something menacing . . . something important . . . something just out of his grasp . . .
As Nat tries to piece together the events―and people―in Beth’s life, it becomes more difficult to discern who can and can’t be trusted. The little town in the English countryside takes on an ominous air, with a threat behind every corner, outside every window. And someone is always watching . . .
Kent’s most recent novel, The Loving Husband, was an international bestseller, and it is in no way hyperbole to declare The Day She Disappeared her very best. It is as brutally unsettling as The Loving Husband, but even more intricate and surprising; as claustrophobic and atmospheric as The Crooked House, but even more heartbreaking in its truths.
Kent has been compared to such masters as Daphne du Maurier and P. D. James. With The Day She Disappeared, a new crop of writers will be compared to Christobel Kent.

The Day She Disappeared: A Novel

He stole her childhood . . . she’ll take his future Something happened, she didn’t know what, something spun, the world turning, back, back, too fast. She would be sick. Bridget put out a hand to steady herself against the wall.
Bridget has a secret―one she keeps from everyone, even her husband. One that threatens to explode when her childhood music teacher, Carmichael, walks into her dress shop. With him is a young girl on the cusp of adulthood, fresh-faced and pretty. She reminds Bridget of herself at that age, naïve and vulnerable. 
Bridget wants him away―away from her, away from that girl. But Carmichael won’t leave her alone, won’t stop stalking her. And Bridget’s not a little girl anymore. When he pushes her too far, she snaps. But what she thought was a decisive act only unravels more insidious threats―more than she could have ever imagined―and from which no one is safe, not even her family. 
The bestselling British author Christobel Kent has written yet another thrilling page-turner with a twisted, riveting conclusion. What We Did is a nightmarish, impossible-to-put-down tale of the secrets we keep from our families, of chilling childhood abuse, and of long-awaited retribution.

What We Did: A Novel

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