DEADLY RIVALRIES is the sixth in Ken Tentarelli’s Italian Renaissance mystery series featuring Nico Argenti, a “detective” before the term was coined. Set in 1466 Florence, this novel showcases the region’s elegance in clothing and art, merchant and aristocratic relationships, and superior culinary prowess.
Tentarelli shares his formidable research with a light hand, sprinkling rather than dumping his details of the time and place. The plot—an investigation into a murder that expands into bribery, assault, and tax fraud crimes that prove pertinent to the case—is engaging and creative. But the plot serves largely as an armature on which to hang the historical details: the characters, livelihoods, relationships, institutions, and tools in what was at the time the world’s wealthiest city.
Included is a healthy dose of cynicism about people and systems (albeit more soft- than hard-boiled). At an engagement party that sets up the story’s murder and subsequent suspects, the groom notes that although the couple are truly in love, the impending marriage is largely about cementing two families’ business interests. He says, “Daniela and I will have no part in the exhibition other than to sit apart from each other and appear happy.” Later, regarding the violent history of a murder suspect, the narration notes that he beat up a man in a bar: “When the Guardia learned the injured man was merely a common laborer,” they released him and apologized to the assailant’s father for the trouble. His rape of a neighbor’s maid “had threatened to be a more serious matter until questioning revealed the maid was Croatian, not Florentine.” Later, “[t]he genial tailor became doubly helpful when he realized the Guardia officers hadn’t come to question him about his illegal gambling activity.”
Intriguing details enliven the story, such as the comic use of tiny stone chips as weapons and a lovely depiction of a Moroccan grieving ritual using beads. Ingenious pre-tech detective methodology is profiled, including the “new” practice of tying colored threads to clue cards pinned to a wall and the tedium of digging through archival records (as precise and time-consuming as today’s). Also as true today as then: maddeningly arcane bureaucracies, system kinks impeding justice, and corruption in high places.
Characters are interesting and varied, among them women who defy the period’s limitations, a talented investigator (whose last name, Colombo, could be a wink), dynastic family members, and workmen of varying classes.
Unfortunately, the novel’s dialogue is weak, often stiff, and sometimes baldly expositional. There are recurrent declarations of speakers’ feelings (like “he said sarcastically” or “with a smirk, he said”) when dialogue alone would do the job better. Too often, information is repeated in later scenes twice—and sometimes even three times.
But these flaws don’t seriously undercut the fun reading experience, which includes an unexpected ending that sets us up for the next installment. Readers will enjoy the immersive time travel evoked in DEADLY RIVALRIES.
Florence during the Italian Renaissance is at the heart of Ken Tentarelli’s engaging murder mystery, DEADLY RIVALRIES. Well-sketched depictions of the behaviors, objects, and people of this opulent period join a creative and surprising murder-mystery storyline in this satisfying read.
~Anne Welsbacher for IndieReader