"Come on, Luca. We're going to be late."
There was no reply from inside his room, so Holly knocked again, harder this time...
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I am required to make it clear at the beginning of my reviews that I received this book for free from Rachel's Random Resources. I have not been paid for doing this and all opinions are my own. I am Bookshop.org affiliated, which means I earn a very small amount of money if you buy from there using my direct link. Although I include purchase links to Amazon, I am not affiliated with them. I include them to make it easy for you to navigate to them if you so wish.
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The Blurb
Bologna, Italy's happiest city - or is it?
A grieving father asks Dan to uncover the truth behind the death of his gifted son, a student at Bologna's prestigious Art Institute. Accompanied by his loyal Labrador, Oscar, Dan heads north from Florence to investigate.
Still life or still death?
The student's former girlfriend is consumed by grief and the Art Institute is mourning one of its brightest talents. But beneath the surface, Dan senses that someone is hiding the truth.
(Artistic) license to kill?
Doing a favour for his friend, Commissario Virgilio Pisano of the Florence murder squad, Dan soon finds himself caught up in the shady world of drug dealing, organised crime and fraud on a grand scale.
A paintbrush with death
When the killer strikes again, Dan faces one of his toughest cases yet. With Officer Oscar's nose for trouble, he must catch the murderer before it's too late.
My Review
Although this is only the second book I have read by this author, it is fast becoming one of my favourite series.
Private Investigator Dan and his canine sidekick Oscar are a wonderful pairing. When Dan is asked to investigate the apparent suicide of a talented young art student, he and Oscar travel to Bologna to take a closer look.
Following his ex-policeman's hunch, Dan soon detects that a murder has occurred. However, the Bologna police also ask him to look into a man who is thought to be involved in organised crime. It is not a spoiler when I say that the two story lines dovetail together beautifully at the book's conclusion.
The setting of Italy allows the author to portray some wonderfully descriptive prose of both the surroundings and the food. He does a great job of bringing both the environment and the characters alive on the page.
It does not matter if you haven't read any of the previous series as each book works well as a standalone. When I previously read another book in this series (link below) I was determined to go back and read some of the earlier books. Alas, time has not permitted me to do so as yet, but I will get there at some point.
This book has much to commend it and I highly recommend it.
Book Details
ISBN: 978 1837031726
Publisher: Boldwood Books
Formats: e-book, audio, hardback and paperback (currently available on Kindle Unlimited)
No. of Pages: 240 (paperback)
Series: Book 17 of the Armstrong and Oscar Cozy Mysteries
Purchase Links
About the Author
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In the authors words:
I’m a man. And a pretty old man as well. I studied languages at Nottingham University a long time ago and then lived and worked in France and Switzerland before going to work in Italy for seven years. My Italian wife and I then came back to the UK with our little daughter (now long-since grown up) where I ran a big English language school for many years. We now live in a sleepy little village in Devonshire. I’ve been writing almost all my life but it was only 13 years ago that I finally managed to find a publisher who liked my work enough to offer me my first contract.
I started off writing romances but after 28 of them, I knew I wanted to try something different, and so the first of the Armstrong and Oscar cozy mysteries, Murder in Tuscany, was born three years ago. I’ve been having a lot of fun ever since getting to know the dynamic duo (and introducing them to people all over the world). These books are cosy crime [a genre I didn't even know existed when I started writing them). They are murder mysteries, but not gory, over-violent stuff, but stories designed to exercise the brain of the reader and to put a smile on their face. Maybe it’s because there are so many horrible things happening in the world today that I feel I need to do my best to provide something to cheer my readers up. My books provide escapism to some gorgeous locations all over my beloved Italy.
You can also find the author at:
My Other Blog Posts Featuring This Author
Murder at Christmas by T. A. Williams
(ARC and media courtesy of Rachel's Random Resources)
(all opinions are my own)
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