A Darkness Descending (Sandro Cellini) - Softcover

CHRISTOBEL KENT'S previous books include A Time of Mourning, A Party in San Niccolo, Late Season, A Florentine Revenge, A Fine and Private Place and The Dead Season. She lives near Cambridge with her husband and five children.

Unrelenting gloom, in setting and spirit, fills Kent’s Florentine noir mysteries. Her hero, Sandro Cellini, formerly a cop but now a private investigator (the noir CV), has a bleak professional and home life. Florence itself is dingy and oppressive in his eyes; even when the plot takes readers to the Piazza della Signoria, for example, it’s the piazza rendered as a bleak backdrop. Too much noir can verge on the ridiculous, and it often does here. However, if the setting doesn’t fit noir, Kent’s take on contemporary politics and her character-driven plot do. A young woman disappears—she is the mother of a six-week-old baby and the wife of a charismatic leader of a political movement that protests mainstream politics. Her body is discovered in the bathtub of a (suitably) depressing seaside town. Both Cellini and his wife, whose loss of a child years earlier still haunts the couple, need to find out what happened to this promising woman. Most interesting are the glimpses of lost souls given through Cellini’s assistant, a woman whom he rescued from addiction and the streets. The tone is overdone, but the plotline is engrossing. --Connie Fletcher