This novel is more romance and about self-discovery than it is a mystery thriller. Lucy works for an American novelist DV, who writes best sellers. When DV falls to his death while staying in a country house in Italy it is left to Lucy to go out and sort out his affairs, as his ex-wives show no interest. Lucy is joined by Massimo who translates for her as she arranges his funeral and the shipping of his possessions. Lucy finds that no one is telling the whole truth about the background to DV's death and when and why his girlfriend, Catherine, left the house. The reader gets a blow-by-blow account of Lucy's illness of fever and sickness one evening after a meal with the neighbouring family. She is saved by the ministrations of Massimo and an affair becomes inevitable. Lucy visits Rome and starts to get answers to her questions and through this process discovers something about herself and about her former employer. A short novel that was enjoyable. ( )

‘DV’ is a famous US novelist now based in Italy. Lucy is his assistant back in New York, annoyed at the success of his punishingly bad prose. But DV dies in the prologue, while walking at night; there are hints of supernatural involvement. She studies photos of his corpse and sees signs of torment before the end. And there is the disappearance of DV’s lover to account for. Lucy is sent to Italy to settle his business affairs.

With irony and black humour the book takes us through themes of ghosts, deadness, hell, relationships, womanhood, beauty, and art.

Spoiler alert

Near DV's house in Tuscany Lucy encounters a faintly sinister family of aristocrats: the elegant but feeble-looking Antonio, his mother, his fiery but elderly father. Lucy seeks evidence of their involvement in DV’s death and the disappearance and possible demise of his lover Catherine.

The blonde lovely Catherine, however, is far from dead. It turns out that she had indulged DV’s swooning only until she'd learnt that his money was all locked up by ex-wives. Upon learning that, she turned on him with a ridicule that lashed him to the core. This chastisement scoured out DV's smugness and self-obsession, and set him on the road to better writing, as Lucy discovers in his final manuscript. Catherine herself learned nothing from their encounter; she simply moved on to set other hearts afire.

Catherine is an artist. She is well aware that she inspired longing and pain in DV, and captured them in a quick, mocking sketch. What she really wants is a man to support her painting, and a shop to sell it in. She tells Lucy she has never loved, and generally seems to personify the cold side of art. But while Catherine justifies all in the name of her creative work, she ultimately appears mediocre and petulant to Lucy.

Exposure to Catherine’s charm turns Lucy toward self-reflection. Lucy does not have the sharp views on sexual politics that one would expect from a modern-day woman in the publishing industry. Modest, competent, genuine, she is without cunning, brilliance or glamour, and discovers she has no sense of herself as an object of desire. Like DV she is a sucker for charisma. So she is a sucker for the gentlemanly and handsome Massimo, who nurses her through a fever. He is elegant and solicitous, yet ultimately after money and position, all his beauty exterior, like Catherine’s; Lucy's love for him is another fever - a fall into hell, into passion, into disorientation.

In contrast to Massimo is Antonio, the unspunky aristocrat who turns out to be sensitive and considerate.

Art stirs longing, but also pain. DV’s ghost labours endlessly at his writing desk. Antonio longed to paint but found it beyond him, though he has never lost his reverence for fine works.

Ghosts play their role as symbols of human passions, or events that are stalled, unresolved. The ghost that lures DV to his death was a man killed by a jealous brother. DV as a ghost calls for Lucy to give him some human recognition of his suffering, and when she does, he is at last freed from torment.

In keeping with his artlessness, DV’s fall into hell took the form of a stumble into a cracked septic tank. Only in his suffering does he attain dignity.

DV and Lucy ‘had both fallen in love with beauty, and beauty had briefly toyed with them. But beauty was invioliable, like great art; it both excited and resisted the passion for possession’. ( )

A curious hybrid between a romance and a mystery novel that works fairly well.
American PA Lucy goes to Italy to settle her dead boss' affairs, and has one herself whilst suspecting there was more to the pulp fiction writer's death than just an accident.
A quick and enjoyable read. ( )

American pragmatist goes to Italy to settle her dead boss's affairs. He was a very successful but terrible writer. She has a torrid affair with a married Roman and stays in the boss's rented Tuscan house which may be haunted. Readable look at Americans in Italy, vacation romance, schlock writers who sell well, Italian character. ( )