Letters to Lorenzo - Hardcover

From the author of Conversations With Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years After His Lordships Death (1987), etc., comes the artfully told story of a widow's attempt to solve the suspicious murder of her husbanda tale as much about the personal growth of a woman as about a murder investigation. Juliet is English by birth and Italian by her marriage to industrialist Lorenzo Gherardi. In 1970s Rome, the couple's leftish political views are both well known and a personal liability in a time of Red Brigade terrorism. But Lorenzo and Juliet are Gucci socialistswell-off sympathizers who read Marx between silk sheets. Theyre safe until Lorenzo's death by a car bomb rips Juliet's life apart. Initially outraged that the police would assume her subversive husband to have been killed for participating in a terrorist plot, she hires sympathetic lawyer Paulo Sastri to help parry the abrasive questions of Carosi, the state prosecutor. Growing inconsistencies unsettle her confidence, however, and Juliet begins following a trail of clues leading to Lorenzo's identity as a terrorist, as well as to his infidelity to Juliet herself. In an unconventional twist, Juliet comes to admire the morally clear and quietly compassionate Carosi while rediscovering the domestic truths that her own ideological engagement had long neglected. Each phase of a persuasive plot nicely captures Juliet's evolving emotional timbreher outrage, suspicion, paranoia, betrayal, and finally her courageallowing her, as a fully dimensional character, to carry the complete weight of an engaging story. The eighth, and best, in this agile writers long and continuing career, with startling twists, distinctive secondary players, and a narrative voice (Juliets) of captivating emotional candor. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Lorenzo Gherardi, a card-carrying member of Italy's young, rich, Red Brigades revolutionaries of the early 1970s, has been blown up by neo-Fascists. Or was he himself a terrorist who made a deadly error with his own explosives? These are the two possibilities his 27-year-old British widow, Juliet (Giulietta to her aristocratic, emotionally manipulative in-laws), faces in this absorbing literary thriller. A Marxist herself, Juliet is determined to clear the stain from Lorenzo's name and to restore order in the life of her young son. To do so she must prove that terrorism is a tactic of the Right, not the Left. The prosecutor Carosi?now repulsive and insensitive, now strangely attractive?suspects that Juliet was Lorenzo's accomplice. The scales fall from the sympathetic narrator's eyes as she conducts a serious moral inquiry about the relationship between politics and love. Several of this novel's many plot twists and turns spin out as the genre shifts from thriller to character study. Sinister characters are intriguingly introduced and then dropped, and in the end Juliet herself seems to have lost interest in uncovering the mystery. Nonetheless, the narrative examines the moment in history when revolution seemed imminent and political violence was thought by some to be a necessary step toward freedom.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.