THE JEWELS OF PARADISE

Cassandra Campbell has a melodic voice and fine, fluid Italian, both important attributes for the narrator of Donna Leon’s first stand-alone mystery. THE JEWELS OF PARADISE focuses on Caterina Pellegrini, a scholar of Baroque opera who returns to her native Venice to examine the contents of two eighteenth-century trunks belonging to a forgotten Baroque composer. Will the trunks contain real jewels, as their odious owners hope, or do they hide something else? As Caterina delves into the mystery, much of the action is in research libraries and involves passages of untranslated Italian. Campbell’s pacing honors the novel’s andante tempo, and her characterizations are fine, albeit somewhat uniform. This is a literary departure for Donna Leon, which will please some, but not all, of her fans. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2012]