Ghirlandaio's Daughter

Jane M. Wilson is a Toronto-based chartered financial analyst in the
investment business.

A fastidious Englishman—in peaceful retirement with his palette and
paints in a historic villa in northern Tuscany—is more than a trifle
disconcerted when his apparent clumsiness leaves him with an
unidentified corpse in the garden. An intrepid and resourceful retired
schoolmistress determines to guard him from further hostile intrusion; a
Teutonic lepidopterist and an American corporate lawyer and their
dysfunctional families stumble into the imbroglio; and murder ensues. It
is up to Hill’s sophisticated poet-detective, Carlo Arbati, to
untangle a puzzle that starts with unconnected events and ends with an
Italian Renaissance painter’s lost works and a conspiracy in the art
world.

While this romp through Italy’s antiquity—with its satisfying plot
and farrago of converging characters—has all the components for a
civilized murder mystery, the book is not quite of this class. A
description of one character’s lasciviousness is so discordant in its
vulgarity as to suggest that the author momentarily forgot which book he
was writing. The author’s juxtaposition of the sublime and the
commonplace is both amusing for its (probably intentional) irony and
irritating for its banality. Ghirlandaio’s Daughter has lost some of
the refinement that Hill showed in The Last Castrato, but it is also
less discursive and faster paced.

Reservations aside, a satisfying whodunit.