Let's be clear upfront: this new book by Donna Leon is not part of her very popular mystery series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venetian Questura. It is however set in Venice, but possibly represents the first of a new series by Leon, featuring Caterina Pellegrini, an expatriate Venetian and musicologist with a doctorate in 17 th century Baroque Opera.
Caterina has been living and working in England at the University of Manchester, the only job she could find, and it has been a cold and uncongenial exile from her native Venice. Another member of the faculty, a Romanian musicologist who drowns his troubles in wine, encourages her to look for another job and get out of Manchester.
Caterina pursues a research job in Venice. Although it is temporary, and the work itself doesn't seem to make much sense to her, it offers possibilities for a musicologist trying to establish a scholarly reputation. A lawyer has hired her to review the contents of two locked trunks, said to be the property of a 17th century Italian composer who was also a well-connected Vatican emissary to the various princedoms that then made up the German Holy Roman Empire. The Abbe Steffani was also mixed up in a notorious scandal in 1694, known to history as the Konigsmarck Affair, in which the licentious Count Konigsmarck, engaged in a intrigue with the wife of the Hanover prince who would become George I of England, disappeared in the middle of the night and was never seen again.
Now two Venetian men, descendants of Steffani's only surviving relations, are each claiming the right to inherit the contents of the trunks. A story handed down in their families insists that Steffani died in possession of a treasure, referred to as "the Jewels of Paradise." Catarina's charge is to examine the contents of the trunks to see if they contain any treasure, or clues to the whereabouts of treasure --- and also any indication of which of his relations Steffani might have designated as his heir.
But it doesn't take Caterina long to smell a rat in this rat's maze of avarice, suspicion and deceit. And unlike the poor Abbe, Caterina has no intention of allowing herself to be used by anyone.
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