A Very Venetian Murder

Venice in September provides the colorful setting for Haughton Murphy's seventh Reuben Frost novel. Gregg Baxter, the best and hottest American fashion designer since Halston, has arrived to host the Euro-party of the year: a dinner at the stunning Palazzo Labia to promote his stylish clothes and a new association with la marchesa Scamozzi, a local fabric designer. Baxter and his entourage are staying at the world-famous Hotel Cipriani, as are Reuben Frost, the distinguished retired Wall Street lawyer, and his wife, Cynthia, a retired ballerina. The Frosts, on their annual Venetian holiday, are inexorably drawn into the strange goings-on involving the celebrity designer, which climax with Baxter's murder in the deserted Calle dei Tredici Martiri (the Street of the Thirteen Martyrs) after a loud, argumentative meal with his staff and a gondola ride with a handsome young male prostitute. The murder - of the richest man ever killed in Venice - is all the more sensational because committed with a razor-sharp glass dagger, of the sort used in earlier times to assassinate traitors to the Venetian Republic. The local police officer assigned to the touchy case, Commissario Jacopo Valier of the Pubblica Sicurezza, soon makes common cause with Frost in trying to solve the crime. Valier, scion of an old Venetian family who's about to retire as a police officer, is a lover of all things American, dating to his "enforced vacation" in Arkansas as a prisoner of war in World War II. With his addiction to 1940s songs and slang, he is one of the most colorful characters Haughton Murphy has yet drawn. Frost and Valier discover that there were many with a reason - and an opportunity - to kill the temperamental Baxter.


Genre: Mystery