'The Sleeping Nymph': a work of art of magnetic beauty, painted by a young partisan fighter during the last days of the Second World War. A painting carrying a shocking secret hidden in the red pigment on the canvas, made with the blood of a human heart.
But whose heart?
There is no body, no confession. Only that faint trace of blood. And that's what leads commissioner Teresa Battaglia - herself hiding an unspeakable truth - to the Resia Valley, in the north eastern part of Italy: a perfect genetic enclave protected for centuries from the outside world.
The valley and the portrait are the only clues for a murder that occurred more than 70 years before. A red thread leading to the shadow of someone hell-bent on protecting a sacred secret.
THE SECOND INSPECTOR TERESA BATTAGLIA NOVELA portrait painted in blood. A valley shrouded in secrecy. A woman fighting for her life.
The talented Italian writer takes us to Friuli in the company of her uncompromising sleuth, Teresa Battaglia. Unlike so many female cops (especially on TV), Teresa is not svelte, soignée or young; she is overweight, over 60 and prone to unbuttoned cursing. And she has a secret she is hiding from colleagues: the onset of Alzheimer's. A canvas by a second world war partisan is found to have been painted with the blood from a human heart in
a mystery yoking in the horrors of the Nazi era, shamanistic rituals and more contemporary murder. It's a heady mix.
