The Light in the Ruins: A preview

Greetings!

"The Light in the Ruins," my next novel, arrives on July 16, 2013.

Some of you have asked me what it's about. So, below, I offer a brief preview: The prologue.

Happy reading!

PS: If you want to add "The Light in the Ruins" to your Goodreads "To Read" queue, click here:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...

* * *

A woman is sitting before an art nouveau vanity, brushing her hair in the mirror. It is, at least according to the police report, somewhere between midnight and three in the morning, on the first Tuesday of June 1955. For dinner she ate a small portion of an impossibly rich pasta – a fettuccini with pecorino cheese and great ladles of truffle oil – at a restaurant popular with wealthy American and British expatriates five blocks west of the Uffizi and a block north of the Arno. She was one of the few Italians there who wasn’t a part of the kitchen or the wait staff. She has since bathed, soaping off both her own perfume and the cologne that was worn by her dinner companion – the fellow who would come back here to the apartment, make love with her on the thin bed no more than three feet from the vanity, and then leave. He was a suspect in the murder investigation, but only briefly. If he had had even the slightest inclination to spend the evening, there is every chance that I would have executed him that night, too.

At the moment, she is wearing her nightgown (which is not especially revealing), though at some point very soon it will be cut off of her. Yes, cut. Not even pulled over her head. Sliced from the opening at her collarbone down to the hem that, when she stands, is mid-shin. By then, of course, she will be dead. Bleeding out. I will have sliced open her neck from one side of her jaw to the other.

Just so you know, that art nouveau vanity is not particularly valuable. The white paint is chipped and two of the whip-like finials along the right side broke off years ago. Before the war. Moreover, her nightgown is cotton, and the material has started to pill. I mention this so you are not envisioning this room as more glamorous than it was. The woman is still beautiful, even now at middle age and despite the horrific, seemingly unbearable losses she endured a decade earlier in the last year of the war. These days, she lives in a neighborhood of Florence that is solidly working class, a section the tourists visit only when they are impressively, almost impossibly lost. A decade earlier, she would not have known a neighborhood like this even existed.

The apartment has neither a doorman nor a primitive intercom connecting the wrought-iron and frosted glass street door with her modest unit. It is locked, but not all that difficult to open. (Really, it wasn’t.) According to the police report, at some point in that rough three-hour window in the early hours of that first Tuesday in June, I used a blunt object (the handle of my knife, as a matter of fact) to break a pane of the glass near the doorknob. Then I reached in and turned the lock, opening the door. Remember, this is an unassuming little building. Then I moved silently up the stairway to the third floor where she lived and knocked on her door. She rose from the vanity, her brush still in her hand, and paused for a moment on her side of the wood.

“Yes?” she asked. “Who is it?”

And here I lied. I said I was her dinner companion, speaking into my gloved hand to muffle my voice.

So she opened the door and would be dead within moments.

And why did I slice open her nightgown? I didn’t violate her. It was so I could cut out her heart. A woman with the lilting name of Francesca Rosati who had once been a Tuscan marchese’s daughter-in-law was my first.

But, as you will see, not my last.