There's no rapture for these crime fiction characters

I'm home from work with the flu. My coughing and sneezing are too much for my dogs, who have disappeared under the bed, leaving me alone to binge watch The Leftovers, whose characters live in a world after a Rapture-like event caused many people to vanish. I can't tell if I'm running a fever or if this TV series, based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, is just downright weird. I'll see if I can collect my thoughts enough to tell you about a couple of books whose characters have their hands full sans a mass disappearance.

A man who's falling from his fifth-floor window windmills his way to the ground in the opening of Maurizio de Giovanni's The Bottom of Your Heart: Inferno for Commissario Ricciardi (translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar; Europa Editions, November 2015). It's a beautiful piece of descriptive writing in a book replete with lively descriptions of life in the sweltering summer of 1939 Italy under Mussolini. The point of view leaps among various short first-person narrations, but it focuses primarily on a third-person omniscient narrator's account of the investigation of Commissario Luigi Ricciardi and Brigadier Raffaele Maione into the death of Professor Tullio Iovine del Castello, chair of gynecology at a university hospital in Naples. There is no shortage of suspects if Dr. Iovine was pushed or thrown; the victim repeatedly flunked an old professional rival's son in his medical school classes, was having an extramarital affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and had enraged a ferocious gangster who swore revenge.

The Botom of Your Heart is the seventh book in this series, and characters from previous books reappear. Ricciardi, who fears for his sanity and keeps himself aloof since "the Deed" that allows him to hear the final thoughts and to see the ghostly shades of people who have died by violence (see Maltese Condor's review here), is still single in his 30s and is living with his beloved tata, now in deteriorating health, and her niece, Nelide. The lonely Commissario also has the affections of Enrica, the shy teacher who lives with her family across the street; Livia Vezzi, a beautiful social butterfly and widow of Italy's most famous tenor; Dr. Modo, the irascible medical examiner; and, of course, his loyal and tireless Brigadier, whose own secrets make him particularly impatient with his informant, Bambinella, a transvestite prostitute. This entertaining series is for people who enjoy crime fiction with a literary bent, keeping track of an ensemble cast of characters, and an Italian setting that's brought to life by its characters' concerns and the author's vivid writing. A reader can begin anywhere in this series, but for the full backstory, start with the first book, I Will Have Vengeance: The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi.

The Italians in de Giovanni's series are natural philosophers. Even sassy private eye Kinsey Millhone is becoming more reflective in Sue Grafton's X (Marian Wood Books/Putnam, August 2015), the 24th book in the alphabet series set in the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California. Unlike other titles in the series (see my review of W Is for Wasted here), this "X" doesn't specifically stand for anything; however, one can find all sorts of Xs (symbolic and real), in the book: Teddy Xanakis, kisses, ex-husbands and wives, mistakes, the missing, a place locator, and unknowns.

In reading X, one gets the sense that things are beginning to wind up for Kinsey. The woman who trims her own hair with a fingernail scissors and has one dress hanging in her closet is financially secure, at least for a while; she can pick and choose her cases. Kinsey agrees to find an ex-con just released from prison only when Hallie Bettancourt says she was referred by one of Kinsey's friends, and Kinsey becomes involved in Pete Wolinsky's old case only when his widow, Ruthie, asks for help in locating financial records for an IRS audit. This isn't one of Grafton's strongest books; the plot feels somewhat contrived, and I was at times annoyed by Grafton's excessive attention to detail (Kinsey doesn't just make coffee, she turns on the machine, adds the coffee, watches the water heat...). Still, it's worthwhile to revisit Santa Teresa to see how one of mysterydom's most likable female sleuths is doing, and we won't have many more chances. Grafton does a great job of conveying what it's like to live on California's Central Coast; here, in 1989. Kinsey still goes to the library to look for old records and composes her case summaries on a Smith & Corona typewriter. She and her 89-year-old landlord and neighbor, Henry, are dealing with some new neighbors and the drought. (Was this timely reading!) In this 24th book, Kinsey seems less inclined to get into trouble, but when the searches for the ex-con and the financial records open cans of worms, she can't help but start digging. By the end, she's learned a thing or two and made her peace with the fact that justice isn't always cut-and-dried.

Books for the Ides of April

I know I'm not Thomas Paine, facing the American Revolution, but I can still say these are the times that try men's souls: the overwork and overworry of tax season. As she related on Saturday, Sister Mary Murderous has been taking refuge in a flood of good TV dramas. My zonked outedness at the end of the day and subsequent middle-of-the-night awakenings have cast me into reading one book after another. I mean, I must achieve a suspension of disbelief somehow, if not in sweet dreams, then in a work of fiction––and I'm not talking about our tax returns! The books below are all timely for the Ides of April.

Maybe one of these days we'll see a greedy Owen Laukkanen villain cheat on his taxes. So far, they've been too engrossed with kidnapping (The Professionals), armed robbery (Criminal Enterprise), and running a murder-for-hire operation (Kill Fee) to bother. In The Stolen Ones (G. P. Putnam's Sons, March 2015), we watch a criminal hierarchy involved in the despicable crime of trafficking women. The man at the top is called the Dragon. His financial demands and reputation for ruthlessness put tremendous pressure on Brighton Beach's Andrei Volovoi, whose truck drivers deliver the shipping containers of victims to their final US destinations. Like all of Laukkanen's villains, Andrei considers himself a regular American businessman. Andrei likes to think that any eastern European woman dumb enough to fall for the trap presented by the American dream deserves the box and whatever comes after.

Then one of Andrei's drivers kills a curious sheriff's deputy and Irina Milosovici, who speaks only a smidgeon of English, escapes from the truck's container. Her beloved younger sister, Catalina, remains trapped with others in the box as the truck drives away. [Note to self: Never be reincarnated as a Laukkanen criminal caught in the middle between cops and worse criminals, although Andrei rises––or perhaps the better word is "sinks"––to the occasion.] What ensues is one of the writer's patented three-ring circus thrillers that also examines a serious social issue. Point of view and setting get juggled between the scrambling bad guys, the separated but feisty Milosovici sisters, and an engagingly mismatched duo of good guys: Kirk Stevens, a veteran in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Carla Windermere, a hotshot FBI special agent. Tension in The Stolen Ones is already the high-wire sort, but Owen Laukkanen, crafty as usual, yanks and twists the wire. Put this guy on your thriller writers must-read list. I feel like I've popped a Xanax when I hear he's working on another.

After a difficult session with the calculator, take a break with the soothingly cynical company of an Italian crime solver. Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen, Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti, and Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano come to mind. Add to these Timothy Williams's Commissario Piero Trotti of the Polizia di Stato in northern Italy. The fourth series book is Black August (originally published in 1995 by Trafalgar Square Publishing; re-released by Soho Crime, January 2015). Trotti is a bit like Ian Rankin's Edinburgh cop, John Rebus, whose life revolves around his work, although Trotti's vice of choice is hard candy rather than the bottle. Like Rebus, Trotti is honest and efficient, but his methods are out of the Dark Ages. He alienates people and can't work on a team.

When the questore, who's read Machiavelli's The Prince, warns him to get out of town on vacation rather than join the Rosanna Belloni murder case, Trotti interprets this to mean the questore really wants him to investigate. This is convenient thinking. Rosanna, a retired headmistress whose corpse is found, battered beyond recognition in her bedroom, is an old friend whom Trotti met 20 years earlier when her student, Anna Ermagni, was kidnapped. With this book, you look at the nature of friendship, professional loyalty, and the mental health system, much more pleasant than checking your Form-1040 figures.

I'll tell you right off the bat, screenwriter Daniel Pyne's novel, Fifty Mice (Blue Rider Press, December 2014), isn't for everybody. For one thing, it's noir of the paranoid variety and deals with themes of reality, memory, identity, and fate. For another, it opens with the kaleidoscopic images and confusion of Jay Johnson's abduction off a Los Angeles Metro train, and what's going on in Jay's subsequent Kafkaesque situation only becomes clear to him and the reader over the course of the novel.

When Fifty Mice begins, Jay is 30-ish something and engaged to be married. He currently works in telephone sales, although he previously worked with data obtained from experiments run on laboratory mice, and he still hangs out at his friend Vaughn's lab. This brings us to yet another reason this book isn't for everyone. Laboratory mice have never been as sympathetic as they are in the tidbits Pyne throws our way. They are in about as much control of their tiny, tragic lives as is Jay, because the outraged Jay finds himself trapped in a Witness Protection program on Catalina Island, off the coast of California, an unwilling possessor of a new identity for God-only-knows-what reason. Jay is clueless, but the feds don't believe that for a moment. It will be to Jay's advantage to figure out, uh, something. After reading these reasons for not recommending this book to every reader, those who will enjoy this memorably original noir know who you are.

I still have some experimenting to do with my income taxes. I wish you the best with your own.

Waiting for Spring

Hemingway

You could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life.  

                            ––Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

These days, hardly a week passes without the promise of another snowfall, and while I have been waiting for whatever is to follow storms Vulcan and Wiley, I have to hold myself back from sticking plastic yellow daffodils and silk flower lilacs in the ground to fool myself into thinking spring has sprung. But in the spirit of new beginnings, I have found several new series that are helping me pass the time.

The first is from Maurizio de Giovanni, who started his writing career in Naples, Italy, when he won a writing competition with a short story set in the 1930s about Commissario Luigi Ricciardi. He followed this up with a quartet of crime novels involving this extraordinary protagonist.

In the first book of the series, I Will Have Vengeance, Ricciardi is one of the most successful of the homicide detectives in the Naples police force. He is a man with no friends, no woman, no social life; just a bunch of scars on his lonely, tormented soul. Still, there is one of his co-workers who is genuinely attached to him, and that is Brigadier Rafaele Maione, his staunch ally and partner.

When he was just a boy, Ricciardi was walking in the woods when he saw a man sitting on the ground under a vine. There was a knife protruding from his chest and a puddle of dark fluid was on the ground. The man, who must have been dead, turned to Luigi Alfredo and said, "By God, I didn't touch your wife." Time stood still for the boy.

Later on, he always thought of the event as the Incident. He had more such incidents, but he learned to keep them to himself lest everyone think he was nuts. He accepted that he saw the dead. Not all of them, and not for long, and only those who had died violently. Even then, he saw the dead ones only for the short time, fraught with extreme emotion, as they revealed their final thought. Ricciardi felt that being a policeman was probably the only profession that could help him deal with the things he was seeing.

The action takes place during a bitter windy March in 1931 (I can sympathize), in an Italy that is struggling to come to grips with the changes brought by fascism. The police are particularly affected, because they have been told by the authorities that in a well-regulated society, there is no crime––since there is no need for it. Ricciardi, on the other hand, has learned from the Incident that hunger and love are the source of all atrocities––and he is not referring to the goings-on in the more famous Eden.

One evening at the Royal Theater of San Carlos during a double opera offering of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, one of the foremost tenors in the world, Arnaldo Vezzi, is found murdered. Ricciardi, when he gets to the scene of the crime, has a few moments all alone with the victim and he listens to what the body has to say. In this case it sings, "I will have vengeance," some of the same words heard in the opera tonight.

Arnaldo Vezzi was adored by millions and hated by hundreds because he was arrogant, mean and brutal, but the powers that be are up in arms at losing such a famed Italian singer, and Ricciardi has his work cut out for him. In the end, I really wanted to introduce him to Harry Bingham's Fiona Griffiths, a Welsh detective who has something in common with him. She sees dead people too, and talks to them. She could pose the big question of whodunnit, and the corpse could give the answer to Ricciardi. These two detectives would complement each other beautifully and they could kiss their loneliness arrivederci.

If you liked other mysteries in the operatic vein, like Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon, Murder in the Pit by Erica Miner, Murder Duet: A Musical Case by Batya Gur, Barbara Paul's Opera series or Susannah Stacey's A Knife at the Opera, you might enjoy this story. It is, however, darker, more intense and very gripping. De Giovanni takes the reader back in time, with his descriptions of what ordinary life was like in this part of the world. He uses small details of hair grooming and clothing to help set the scenes in the days of the 1930s. I can't wait to get a copy of the next book, Blood Curse.

On the other hand, one person's spring is another person's dead of winter. Victoria Houston authors a series that plays out in the lake region of northern Wisconsin. When retired dentist Paul Osborne goes kayaking in late March, looking for likely fishing spots, he calls it spring. When I learned that it still dropped to ten below at night, I would have called it something else.

In Dead Angler, the first of the series, Paul is recuperating from the death of his wife, which had led him into an alcohol-fueled downward spiral. But now, in recovery, he has been tidying up his home that fronts on Loon Lake. Deciding to get rid of some fly-fishing gear that he had not used in a while, he takes it to a friend who convinces him to take up the sport again, and he sets Paul up for a few refresher lessons. His tutor turns out to be the recently-installed Chief of Police, Lewellyn Ferris, who just happens to be a female who can really show him a thing or two about fly fishing. The first thing Paul gets on his line, however, is a dead body, hardly recognizable, except that Paul thinks he recognizes the teeth. In his youth, Paul had been in the military and was experienced in forensic dentistry.

You guessed it! Paul teams up with Lew to help take a bite out of crime and the series is delightful, since it combines murder and mayhem with the poetry of fly fishing. On the breaks from investigating the murder, spending time in the water is the order of the day. Paul is reconnected with the harmony of nature, because he senses that only fly fishing can take you so close to the heart of the water. But he has a lot to learn. This type of fishing is defined by conventions more confusing than a game of bridge. The angler has to have an arcane knowledge of the life cycles of the insects hatching at that very moment––not 30 minutes earlier, and then select the perfect fly to match it.

There is a particular movement called "dancing the fly" in which fisherman chooses not to reel in, but to simply dance the dry fly across the currents to tantalize the big ones lurking below. Expert fly fisher that Lew is, she also uses this movement to lure the bad guys into giving themselves up.

Houston’s stories are original, with excellent plotting and while I am not in the mood to visit Wisconsin at the moment, I plan to trip my way through this series, because I've developed a small addiction to it.

If you are a fisherman, there is another series by Keith McCafferty that has a backdrop of fly fishing in Montana. It begins with The Royal Wulff Murders, which is a fantastic introduction both to the sport and this part of the country. It is endorsed by two of my favorite authors, Patrick McManus and Craig Johnson. The third in the series, Dead Man's Fancy, was published by Viking in January 2014. They feature Sheriff Martha Ettinger and Sean Stranahan, a fishing, painting PI.

I am taking heart from these words: "In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed." Ernest Hemingway, "Waiting on Spring," A Moveable Feast

Review of Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano’s First Case

Montalbano's First Case by Andrea Camilleri

Salvo Montalbano and the sea go together like spaghetti and squid ink. It may not work as a combination here, but in Sicily it is a match made in heaven. But Montalbano began his career as a policeman in Mascalippa, an area of meadows carpeted with grass, polka-dotted with livestock, mountains in the distance but not a breath of salty air and it was killing him. He thought it was akin to being in jail.

When he heard a rumor that he was to get his promotion to Chief Inspector, he was not sure whether that was good news or bad news. Fortunately for him, his boss had been able to read his hangdog expressions over the past years and had recommended that he get his promotion, but in a different location: Vigàta, on the coast.

He took a trip to visit his home-to-be and, just as he got out of the car, he was assailed by an exquisite perfume, a mixture of stagnant seawater, rotten seaweed, decaying fish, ancient ropes and sardines. He knew he could be happy here.

The first thing he did was to find a trattoria on the main drag where, after he had eaten enough for four or five people, he still felt light as a feather. Salvo felt absolutely certain that the move to Vigàta was preordained. The only fly in the ointment was in the guise of an almost insignificant traffic accident that occurred right in front of Montalbano, who had yet to identify himself to anyone in the town as a policeman, much less their new chief Inspector.

As Montalbano was waiting outside the restaurant, a sports car came speeding out of nowhere. It swerved slightly and sideswiped a slower car. The driver of this slower car was an elderly gentleman wearing glasses. The elderly man stopped his vehicle and got out to inspect it. The speeder in the roadster got out of his car and approached the old man and smashed him in the face before the speeder was forced back into his own car by a passenger and then tore off.

Montalbano took charge, but there was a traffic cop there as well, and it would be some time before Montalbano settled into his job in Vigàta. By the time he did, this little case began to develop twists and turns, with strings pulling at Salvo this way and that. He actually began to feel that thin, invisible wires were moving him forward like a puppet.

Who wrote that? "Ah, Pirandello," thought Montalbano, but this thought segued into the plot of the Argentine author Borges, who narrated the plot of a mystery in which everything could be traced back to the random encounter between two chess players on a train who had never met before. The two players planned a murder, executed it and managed to avoid raising any suspicion. This first case is like many of Montalbano's cases. He has to be more wily than the crooks and the mafia, and slyer than the politicians, if he wants to keep landing on his feet. Particularly if he wants to do it with his honor and integrity intact.

Carmine Fazio, who becomes Montalbano's deputy, wants to understand what kind of boss he is going to be working under. Salvo explains. His philosophy is comparable to homemade sweaters made of wool.

But that's a pattern I can't divulge without giving away too much. This ebook novella is a prequel that is as enjoyable as the entire Camilleri series.

Note: Montalbano's First Case was translated from the Italian by Gianluca Rizzo and Dominic Siracusa and published by Mondadori/Open Road Integrated Media in October 2013. I received a free e-galley from NetGalley for purposes of review.

Review of Serge Quadruppani's The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees

That yellowish glob is the bee's pollen basket

The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees by Serge Quadruppani (translated from the Italian by Delia Casa)

We're already flabbergasted by the ongoing shutdown of the United States government, which keeps many federal workers home, so why not look at another perplexing workers' disappearance?

Colony collapse disorder involves the sudden vanishing of worker honey bees from their hives. While the queen bee continues tirelessly laying her eggs, there are no workers to provide food for the colony. The cause of CCD isn't clear. Because pollinating bees play an essential role in the world's food production, this mysterious new syndrome is receiving a lot of attention.

Honey bees are at the heart of Serge Quadruppani's The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees, published on September 3 by Arcade. The story begins when vacationing Commissario Simona Tavianello and her husband, Marco, a recently retired police chief, pay a visit to Giovanni Minoncelli's honey shop in Italy's Piedmont region. The long-married Tavianellos are both stubborn and, despite their deep love for each other, they often resemble two rams with their horns locked. Their relationship—already frosty because Simona is resentful that they're vacationing in the mountains rather than at the sea—drops a few more degrees when her attempt to open Minoncelli's door is blocked by a corpse on the floor inside. Nearby is a piece of paper that proclaims, "THE WORKER BEE REVOLUTION."

It turns out that beekeeper Minoncelli is a militant environmentalist well known to the police, and the dead man, Bertolazzi, was an engineer with Sacropiano, a corporation involved with genetically modified organisms and pesticides. But the case is more complex than it looks at first glance. Minoncelli has an alibi for the time of the shooting, and the gun used was the one Simona had left in her hotel room. Therefore, she feels an obligation to assist Maresciallo Calabonda, whose life was made miserable when the local newspaper welcomed him to Torre Pellice by misspelling his name as "Cacabonda," and the name stuck. Calabonda is happy to have the help of Simona, famous for her work with the National Antimafia Commission, as long as she is willing to let Calabonda take the credit.

It isn't long before Simona is convinced that the mountain air leads to lunacy, as crimes mount, identities are mistaken, and immigrants are misunderstood. She interacts with one eccentric technophile after another, including an extremely shy newspaper reporter named Felice, who is passionately interested in a neural network software program applied to crime scenes; a cranky coroner; and the expert on bees, Prof. Aldo Martini, described as a "huge, lanky insect."

In fact, people described in animal terms is only one aspect of a theme in this book: how humans are just one cog in nature, but they're mucking up the whole works. Hikers make their way up into the "great embrace" of the mountains, but all the valley's toxic emissions are captured in the snow of the mountain peaks, where cows in their pastures look down on the world with "sweet, fly-encircled, melancholy gazes." Deer pause, looking askance at what humans are doing. For a short time, we see the world through the eyes of a tiny Slovenian worker bee. She is depicted in such gorgeous sensual terms one dreads anything bad happening to her; it's writing like this that makes CCD seem a personal tragedy.

In addition to the witty and beautiful passages about nature, there are mouth-watering little moments devoted to food. Marco is Neopolitan and proud, but he's curious about "exotic" cuisines, which for him begin about 20 miles outside of his home city, and he is tormented by the thought of Simona enjoying good food and drink without him. I was tortured, too. It was all I could do not to hit the wine aisle at the nearby grocery store after reading about "the cheerful scent of violets wafting off the plaisentif cheese and mingling with the bouquet of that same delicate flower in a bottle of Barolo Fossati 2000."

Quadruppani's English crime-fiction debut is charming; at 203 pages, it left me wishing for more fleshed-out sequels. It reminds me a bit of Margaret Atwood's dystopian trilogy in its obvious love of nature and cautious stance toward corporations, and of Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano books in its squabbling characters and leftist takes on the exploitation of immigrants, the sad state of investigative journalism, and the corrosive power of governmental bureaucracies.

We should all be concerned about what happens when capitalists and governments get their hands on miraculous scientific breakthroughs in nano-, bio-, and computer technologies. The very nature of living things, including humans, is vulnerable to modification in both good and evil ways. Modifications might look beneficial but carry unforeseen consequences. I appreciated The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees as entertaining crime fiction, but mostly for the questions it raises about the artificialization and commoditization of all natural organisms.

The Road to Hell

Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the first part of his epic poem Divine Comedy, has inspired many tributes since it was written seven centuries ago. From writers like Milton and Marx, to Craig Johnson, Dante's poetic vision of hell has influenced literature. Musicians, from opera to Celtic music, have based their works on some themes of this same poem. Many painters have tried to depict the reality of what Dante wrote. Wildly popular in its time, it was the first work of literature written in the vernacular and thus accessible to every man or woman (if they could read). It is on the list of books I plan to read.

Dan Brown is well known for tackling historical subjects and causing great controversies over some of his ideas. There were plenty of readers who couldn't separate fact from fiction in his early works. In Inferno (Doubleday, 2013), Brown confronts modern problems facing the world today.

(Warning: Lots of plot description ahead, but not mystery spoilers.)

The saga begins when Robert Langdon wakes up from a nightmare, shouting. He finds himself in a hospital bed with absolutely no recollection of how he'd gotten there. Or where he'd been. He assumes he must have been in an accident, because he has stitches in his head––as well as amnesia.

In his nightmare, he'd been calling out something that sounds like "very sorry." It is not until he looks out the window that he realizes that he is in Italy––Florence to be specific. He is positive that he began his day at Harvard, where he is well known as a professor of Art History and Symbology.

A doctor comes into his room and introduces herself as Sienna Brooks, but before many more words come out of her mouth, an armed assassin bolts into the room, kills one person and is aiming for Langdon. Sienna pulls him into another room and they escape. And so it begins, a chase unlike any other. Langdon and Sienna are on the run, but they don't know who is on their heels or why they are in someone's sights. From past experience, Langdon should have considered a secret organization plot, but then he was having memory problems.

La Mappa dell’Inferno by Sandro Botticelli

Their first bolthole is Sienna's sparsely furnished apartment, and their first order of business is to call the American Consulate. Sienna goes next door to find Robert some clothes and he takes a moment to look through Sienna's computer for the latest news to see if it offers any insight into what has brought him to this city. But there is nothing. Then, Langdon has just about enough time to take off his hospital gown and cover his heinie, when Sienna shows him a hidden pocket in the back of his jacket––which she has had the foresight to bring along, despite their haste. In the pocket is a mechanism that projects an image.

In this case, it is Sandro Botticelli's La Mappa dell’ Inferno (The Map of Hell), one of the more frightening visions of the afterlife ever created. As Langdon looks at it closely, he sees that there have been some alterations in the artwork and he sees things that have also been manifesting in his recent nightmares of white-haired women, blood-red rivers and the stench of death. There is also the image of a plague mask, a uniquely shaped mask with a long beak. Doctors treating plague victims, who felt the long beak kept the pestilence from reaching their nostrils, wore it. The disease also known as The Black Death killed about a third of the population in the 14th century.

This piece of artwork was a tribute to the work that has become one of the world's most celebrated writings, Dante's Inferno, which presents the poet's macabre vision of his trip through the nine levels of hell that had tortures for specific types of sins. The painting reveals a subterranean funnel of suffering with fire, brimstone and sewage, with Satan himself waiting at the bottom.

The inspection of the image is interrupted by the squeal of tires and sirens, as police cars pull up and what appears to be an armed squad of soldiers with death or capture on their minds thunder up the stairs. Langdon and Sienna flee out the back way, thinking that the US government is after them as well.

Porta Romana

For  Langdon, the most serious problem is that he has no memory. His key strength is his eidetic memory, which is his main intellectual asset. He is accustomed to recall every little detail of what he sees around him, so he struggles as he looks at the painting to puzzle out the changes made to the image. He feels sure that interpreting these changes will provide the clues he needs to help understand what has been happening to him. He decides the first clue is "seek and you shall find," a phrase written on the Botticelli painting.

Sienna's asset is a mind of incredible genius that it has set her apart from all her peers most of her life; but she lacks the art education to help Langdon.

The one thought that comes to Langdon's mind is that what he had been saying during that nightmare was "Vasari," not "very sorry," and he had to have been referring to Giorgio Vasari, an Italian painter and architect who has painted a mural at the Palazzo Vecchio. The twosome head there, and on the way Robert catches a glimpse of the white-haired woman from his dreams.

Museo Casa di Dante

To follow Langdon's scavenger hunt for clues, the author takes the couple on a historical journey through the notable sights of Florence, not missing many. Beginning at the Porta Romana part of the old walled city, they hie to the Istituto statale d'arte. They rush from there through the famous Boboli Gardens and into the Palazzo Pitti.

Sneaking out through the Buontalenti Grotto, they dash into the Palazzo Vecchio where they hasten to the Hall of Five Hundred and then escape through the Hall of Geographical Maps.

Now there comes a charge through Robert's mind, with memories and revelations hitting him like jolts of electricity.

Hall of Maps

They spring to the Museo Casa di Dante that leads to Chiesa di Santa Margherita de' Cerchi and, finally, they dart to the Baptistery of San Giovanni, with doors by Ghiberti, where they find Dante's death mask, in which there are clues that lead them to Venice and Saint Mark's Square.

Are you tired yet? This is the first rest the two have had. I needed a rest for sure! I took one.

San Giovanni

While the dynamic duo is running in circles, a great push is being made to understand the death of a well-known scientist, Bertrand Zobrist, a gene engineer, and to seek and find the legacy that he left the world before he killed himself by jumping out a high window. He was a Transhumanist who espoused a philosophy that humans should use all available technologies to engineer their own species to make it stronger, leading to survival of the fittest. Mostly, these Transhumanists are scientific futurists, visionaries and apocalyptic thinkers; believers that the end is coming and that drastic action is needed to be taken to save the future of the species.

To Zobrist, the main problem facing the world today is overpopulation. Zobrist claimed that he felt trapped on a ship where the passengers doubled every hour in geometric progression, while he tried desperately to build a lifeboat before the ship sunk under its own weight. He advocated throwing half of the people overboard. He felt the 14th-century bubonic plague was a boon to society, which was more healthy, wealthy and wise after the population was decimated––and this is what led to the Renaissance. He pushed for a similar drastic solution. Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey, the head of the World Health Organization, expects the worst. Of course, the reader accepts that the paths of Langdon and Sienna's two searches are bound to intersect.

Doge's Palace, Venice

Meanwhile, the intrepid pair find a clue at The Horses of Saint Mark, speed through Doge's Palace in Venice and finally scurry to some of Dante's favorite places––like the Baptistery of San Giovanni where Dante was baptized––which leads to St. Mark's Chiesa d'Oro, where Dante met his lifelong love, Beatrice, and where Langdon and Sienna gain additional insights.

The trail leads now 1,000 miles to Istanbul, and they fly (hope they serve nuts on the plane; they haven't eaten for a long time) to the crossroads of Europe and, lastly, they race to the Hagia Sophia, the eighth wonder of the world, an amalgamation of Christian and Islamic art and architecture. I have to stop here before I completely spoil the mystery.

Hagia Sophia

You can guess that I found the endless descriptions a bit daunting. Hardly a page was without a detailed description of some fabulous church, castle, city square, or in-depth sketch of a famous personage of historical significance. One reason I really enjoyed the illustrated versions of The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons is because the truism was true: a picture is worth a thousand words. The hundreds of visual images in those books brought the descriptions to life.

Readers who gravitate to codes and symbols will enjoy parts of Brown's Inferno. Firenzophiles will appreciate the travelogue, and history enthusiasts will learn a lot.

It seemed that whenever the plot got thin or repetitive, Brown tried to dazzle his audience with art, architecture and historical name-dropping. But as with other books from Dan Brown, I had to think and was left pondering the following from Dante’s Inferno: The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

What would I be willing to do to save humanity? Something to mull over in these hot-as-Hades days.