Villa Triste

Lucretia Grindle's Villa Triste has been on my reading list for years - and it is fantastic.

In many ways, all of them good, the book's structure reminded me of Elizabeth Is Missing. Villa Triste essentially consists of two narratives. One of them is the slowly unfolding tale of Caterina Cammaccio, a nurse by day and a reluctant partisan (or Italian resistance fighter) by night. The setting is World War II Florence, simultaneously occupied by Nazis and overrun with fascists. The other narrative is actually a mystery. Giovanni Trantemento, an elderly and decorated former partisan, has been brutally murdered in his own home. As Florence's top cop, it's up to Alessandro Palliotti to solve the crime, but when another former partisan is similarly murdered elsewhere in Italy, it's clear to him that Trantemento's murder wasn't a mere crime of opportunity.

As in Elizabeth is Missing, the two narratives that form the heart of Villa Triste are closely intertwined and the story unfolds magnificently. (I should add that the way in which the events during the war directly impact the current mystery also recalls Once We Were Brothers.) Grindle has pulled off both the mystery and historical fiction elements of her novel beautifully, while creating an array of remarkable characters.

I have read no small number of books (fiction and non-fiction) with World War II as the backdrop. Villa Triste is the first book I've read about the war in Italy, though, which also lent it an additional interest factor as I was reading.This is an easy book to recommend to lovers of historical fiction or mysteries or both. Happy reading!