Sandro Cellini Books
Meet Sandro Cellini, Florence’s answer to Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti. One wet November in Florence, the grieving widow of an eminent Jewish architect comes to visit Sandro Cellini, good husband, disgraced ex-policeman, and recently turned PI, to ask him to investigate her husband’s suicide. Cellini takes her on out of sympathy, although this first case makes a downbeat start to his new career. There seems no doubt that Claudio Gentileschi, a Holocaust survivor and lifelong depressive found drowned on a bleak stretch of the River Arno, did take his own life, and initially Cellini imagines that his only duty is to support the widow through her time of mourning. But as Cellini doggedly retraces the architect’s last hours through the worst rains since the devastating floods of 1966, a young Englishwoman is found to have gone missing from the city’s community of hard-drinking, high-living art students, and Sandro’s search turns abruptly into something grimmer and more urgent than he could have imagined, as he uncovers a network of greed and corruption that is hidden under a veneer of tradition and refinement. The Drowning River is a spot-on, atmospheric new mystery, the first in a series featuring Cellini.
"As Sandro Cellini comes to grips with the realities of life as a private detective, touting for business and following errant teenagers, an old case comes back to haunt him. Charming and ruthless Loni Meadows, the subject of a routine background check early in Sandro's career, goes off the icy road in her car one night. The circumstances of her death seem less than accidental to Sandro -- however inconvenient his suspicions might be."
Florence is shimmering in the summer heat. Former policeman turned private detective Sandro Cellini is investigating the case of a man who seems to have vanished into thin air, leaving his pregnant wife behind him. But the man lies amidst the shrubbery of a busy roundabout, his corpse bloating in the humid air.
When private investigator Sandro Cellini is invited to attend a glamorous launch party for a luxury residence overlooking the glittering expanse of Florence, he has no idea what he's walking into.Behind the ancient and luxurious facade of Palazzo San Giorgio, there lies a series of terrible secrets; an old torture chamber, hidden for centuries in the bowels of the building, and a much more recent malevolence. The former head of security for this elite development has just died under suspicious circumstances and Sandro finds himself—quite literally—stepping into dead man's shoes.He soon discovers that other unsavory incidents have tainted the prestigious opening. When one of the residents is found murdered in her room, events begin to spiral out of control. Sandro must work to untangle the complex web of relationships that exists between residents and staff to unmask a deadly killer, in this superb new Florentine mystery by Christobel Kent.
Sandro Cellini faces his demons... Sandro Cellini hasn't set foot in La Vipera, a derelict farmhouse just outside Florence that was once home to a free-living commune, for forty years - until the discovery of two bodies nearby leads him back there. At the start of his career, Cellini investigated an accusation that minors were being corrupted at La Vipera, but no charges were ever brought. Now, tasked with tracking down former members of the community, he has a chance to finally discover what really went on all those years ago. But in order to learn the true nature of the commune's mission, he must face his own traumatic memories. As he sifts through the lies, those closest to him are placed in danger. Only Cellini can unravel the final mystery of La Vipera, and so protect those he loves.