Ghirlandaio's Daughter (Wwl Mystery , No 279)

The Story

The figure lay on its back, arms flung wide, with the bronze spear of a Mycenaean warrior planted squarely in the middle of its chest. Nigel Harmsworth, septuagenarian, and expatriate English painter, stared at the splayed corpse in disbelief. That he should find himself surveying the body of a dead American in the garden of the beautiful Tuscan villa owned by his friend and patron Sir Richard Danvers, an international art dealer, was extraordinary enough. More unsettling still were the events that were to follow, and the secrets that would emerge from the past. What no one anticipated, however, were the prodigious deductive powers of Detective Carlo Arbati, visiting the medieval town of Lucca to receive an award for his most recent volume of poems. When the poet-detective is drawn into the case, justice is certain to triumph - but more blood must flow before Arbati is able to unweave the tangled web of intrigue and deceit that has baffled the local authorities.