The book is historical fiction and interesting because it provides such a good picture of life in Italy in the 1930s. Isabella’s husband was one of Mussolini’s Blackshirts—thugs in the same league as the Gestapo in Germany. Isabella’s husband Luigi had been shot ten years earlier, and Isabella badly wounded in the same incident. Together with Roberto Falco a charming photographer, Isabella is now forced to solve some major issues in her life, issues that originated more than ten years earlier. It is a hard-to-put-down novel, with intrigue, well-researched and lively history and romance to mix with the pain.