Джон Спенсер Хилл — новинки

The figure lay on its back, arms flung wide, with the bronze spear of a Mycenaean warrior planted squarely in the middle of its chest. Nigel Harmsworth, septuagenarian, and expatriate English painter, stared at the splayed corpse in disbelief. That he should find himself surveying the body of a dead American in the garden of the beautiful Tuscan villa owned by his friend and patron Sir Richard Danvers, an international art dealer, was extraordinary enough. More unsettling still were the events that were to follow, and the secrets that would emerge from the past. What no one anticipated, however, were the prodigious deductive powers of Detective Carlo Arbati, visiting the medieval town of Lucca to receive an award for his most recent volume of poems. When the poet-detective is drawn into the case, justice is certain to triumph - but more blood must flow before Arbati is able to unweave the tangled web of intrigue and deceit that has baffled the local authorities.

"The corpse hung from the cross above the altar, its head slumped forward, its arms hooked crudely over the crosspiece like a pinioned fowl. The body was that of a man in his early fifties, slight and balding, with haughty chiselled features: a grotesque icon, a parody of sanctity. In place of thorns he wore the silk skullcap of a cardinal in the Roman Church, twisted askew as if he had dressed hastily, and the scarlet cassock of his office fell in folds to the polished toes of a pair of hand-tooled shoes." Cordelia Sinclair, a thirty-five-year-old American, who has arrived in Florence to write a thesis on the origins of Italian opera, knows nothing of this extraordinary event, nor does she have any inkling of the central role she is supposed to play in the series of bizarre murders that are rocking the ancient city. Robbery? A Mafia hit? An act of murderous revenge? To Detective Carlo Arbati, a published poet, the fact of the cardinal's severed vocal cords means he must confront the horrific rituals of a secret group of idealists who had tried, years earlier, to revive the glories of the Renaissance opera, where castrati had sung the soprano parts.