The name Borgia is synonymous with the corruption, nepotism, and greed that were rife in Renaissance Italy. The powerful, voracious Rodrigo Borgia, better known to history as Pope Alexander VI, was the central figure of the dynasty. Two of his seven papal offspring also rose to power and fame - Lucrezia Borgia, his daughter, whose husband was famously murdered by her brother, and that brother, Cesare, who served as the model for Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince.
Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carre's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive.
Cindy Nathan hires Lorraine Page - ex-LA cop, ex-wife, ex-hooker and recovering alcoholic - to clear herself of her husband's murder. It soon becomes clear that Cindy had every reason to kill her husband, and that two ex-wives both had equally powerful motives for revenge.
Family ties mean trouble, chains and fatal obligations. And when steeplechase jockey Kit Fielding comes to the aid of his twin sister and her husband, even death threatens.
What was the nude, recently slain body of Kaithlin Jordan doing spoiling the pristine turquoise waters of Miami Beach -- especially when the dead socialite's convicted killer husband is sitting on Death Row for having murdered her...ten years ago! Reporter Britt Montero lives for this kind of story.
