Beginning

Started out eerily enough. Man spies another man out in the front yard with a rifle, what else is there to do but go chase him through the woods in the middle of the night? I think it's needless to say that the man doing the chasing (DV) ends up dying, but not in the way you would have guessed it. Now his assistant (Lucy) has to fly over to Italy and start the process of going through the dead man's belongings.

Middle

*Sigh* With over forty pages of the main character being ill and lying in bed, it's enough to make you want to hurl, hurl the damn book across the room. Really, it's nothing more than endless chapters filled with the phrases "and she awoke" and "she still didn't feel well", oh and "just when she thought her stomach could hold the liquid down". Give me a break.

Finally when Lucy does feel well she immediately starts a fling with a married Italian (Massimo - who will now be known as Mass) who has been caring for her. Now the reader is meant with the challenge of figuring out if she is in love with him, or is really just having a good old romp in the hay. Good luck figuring it out though, because in one paragraph she is watching his every move, acting on every word he says; and in the next chapter she is commenting on how she will leave him soon to return home.

At this point you will also start noting sudden jumps in the story. In one chapter, Lucy and Mass are eating dinner with the local family and suddenly out of nowhere Lucy is reading the next few pages in DV manuscript. Hopefully the end will be better.

End

And it wasn't. I wish Martin would have chose a side. Is this going to be a Gothic Mystery, or a Romance? Or a unique blend of both, which is certainly doable, but Martin failed to do it. It remained a Romance with barely a hint of what the book started off as, and continued right up until the last 40 pages, where it clicked back into Mystery mode and although these last pages were written beautifully, with enough suspense that it literally gave me goosebumps, it was still too little too late.

Linkage