Members of the Rosati family are being gruesomely murdered. Who would want to kill them, and why? One detective thinks the answers lie in the past in events that occurred at the family villa over ten years before during World War II. The Germans occupied that section of Tuscany and tried to make a stand against the Allies at the villa. But why would the killer wait so long to exact revenge?
The story is told in three different interspersed sections: during the war at the Rosati villa, the present of 1955, and the killer’s point of view. I felt that I should have been able to guess the identity of the killer before I did, knowing the killer’s inner thoughts, but I just didn’t put it all together. War is awful and horrible things happen, yet not everyone seeks individualized retribution the way the killer in this novel felt was warranted.
Not one of Bohjalian’s best, but I’m not going to give up on this talented writer. He’s not afraid to try something new and different, which I think is wonderful, but this time I don’t think it worked out very well.
