Ahhh, Florence

Probably the most exciting thing about this book -- Death in Autumn by Magdalen Nabb -- is that it's the book I saw in the airport at Rome, didn't buy, and then couldn't find again. So how did I find it, you ask? I picked it up at the Open Books/Reader book swap. Pure serendipity. I see from that old post that I thought the book I was looking for had an Italian author, which is what tripped me up trying to find it again; Nabb is (or was) British.

And this story has a further happy ending, because I enjoyed this book. It's not very long and it's a good, focused mystery story that manages to also have plenty of good characters and local color. I liked that the main detective, the Marshal, and his senior, the Captain (am I going to go figure out their names? no I am not) were working together on the case. In fact, on the whole, this was a very competent group of police with little internal tension, which is rare. Usually, even if you have a clever police detective in a novel s/he is working against corruption or laziness or bureaucracy or stupidity in their own force, so I thought this was a nice change of pace.


I don't have much else to say about this, I suppose, except that I am looking forward to returning to this series.