![]() For her students, it’s a wealth of history, art, and beauty. It’s 1938 when art teacher Juliet Browning arrives in romantic Venice. Caroline’s quest: to scatter Juliet “Lettie” Browning’s ashes in the city she loved and to unlock the mysteries stored away for more than sixty years. Her beloved great-aunt Lettie leaves her a sketchbook, three keys, and a final whisper… Venice. A transplanted Brit, Bowen divides her time between California and Arizona.įollow her on Twitter THE VENICE SKETCHBOOKĬaroline Grant is struggling to accept the end of her marriage when she receives an unexpected bequest. Her books have been translated into many languages, and she has fans around the world, including seventeen thousand Facebook followers. Bowen’s work has won twenty honors to date, including multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Rhys Bowen is the New York Times bestselling author of more than forty novels, including The Victory Garden, The Tuscan Child, and the World War II-based In Farleigh Field, the winner of the Left Coast Crime Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel and the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel. What will those keys open? What clues does the sketchbook contain? And will Caroline, her great niece, be able to right the wrongs of long ago? Her last bequest to her beloved great niece is a box containing three keys and a sketchbook. An old woman dying, having lived a life that her family had no idea about. What if she had another life that none of us knew about?Īnd so the story grew in my head. What if she met someone there? A sort of ‘same time, next year’. What if it was not just the city and the Easter celebrations that attracted her. And an improbable thought entered my head. “A lady does not go out unescorted after dinner,” she said.Ī few years ago I was thinking about my aunt and wondered why it was always Venice at Easter, not Rome or another Italian city. When she took me to Rome once and I suggested we go out after dinner she looked horrified. She was the typical English spinster, very prim and proper. A lifelong Italiafile, she went to Venice every Easter. Mark’s Square, as they did every morning, (before it became a thirty dollar extravaganza). We’d have had no way of contacting them during the day, unless they were taking their morning coffee in St. It must seem amazing to parents now that mine would let their children loose in a strange city in days before cell phones. You can’t…:īut I went through and yes-we came out to exactly the place I was heading. We got to know our way around really well, in fact when I went back again for the first time, taking my daughter who had just graduated from high school, I’d stop and say, “If you go through this little tunnel, I think you’ll come out…” We’d explore back alleys, climb trees in the Giardini, swim at the Lido and check out every gelato stand in the city. “See you at five o’clock,” they’d say and we were free to wander the city on our own. Every day we’d drive across the causeway, park and my parents would give us some money. When I was a teenager my parents rented a little villa just outside the city of Venice. I have a life-long love of Venice that started in my childhood. Spending a summer doing research in Venice was an absolute treat, rekindling all my memories of past vacations in that city. Who wouldn’t want to write about that magical city, where the marble palaces seem to float above the water, where a gondolier’s song echoes up from the canals. But in the case of THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK I can tell you exactly what created the story for me. ![]() An afternoon trip to Ellis Island sparked my whole Molly Murphy series. A tiny germ of an idea turns into something bigger: an overheard snatch of conversation turns into a full-blown mystery. Sometimes it isn’t possible to define this. ![]() One question writers are always asked is where we get our ideas from. We asked Rhys, what is so special about Venice? THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK (Lake Union | on sale April 13 th, 2021), opens in Venice, 1938: a country on the brink of war and a woman at the beginning of a quest that begins with locked-away memories from a family legacy. Rhys Bowen returns with a sweeping historical novel that will leave a mark in the hearts of readers everywhere.
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