Jane Jakeman, In the City of Dark Waters

In the City of Dark Waters

Jane Jakeman

Berkley, May 2006, $23.95

ISBN: 0425209814

In the first decade of the twentieth century in Venice, British Consul Theseus Barton provides fellow Oxford graduate lawyer Revel Callender with assignments that enables the English expatriate to live reasonably, albeit somewhat shabbily in the city. Theseus sends Revel to the home of Palazzo Casimiri, part of an affluent English banking family, whose elderly principessa needs legal assistance with documents. Upon arrival at the Casimiri residence, Revel finds a corpse of his client awaits him.

Still hired to organize her papers, Callender finds the swinging body of Count Casimiri hanging from a tree. He sees knife wounds all over the corpse, but the police, heeding the warning advice of a powerful patrician, insist suicide occurred. Artist Claude Monet and his wife arrive having fled Paris after the scandal of the homicide of his brother-in-law. He wants Callender to go to France to investigate the murder, though both the artist and the attorney know he can do nothing but report his findings to him. In Venice, while pondering Monet's request, and ignoring the police, attempts on his life, and falling in love with Clara Casimiri, Callender continues to investigate because he knows a murder occurred.

Jane Jakeman provides an intriguing look at Venice circa 1908, using an amateur sleuth whodunit to paint a picture of a morally corrupt society in which injustice is the norm. Callender is a fine protagonist whose need to learn the truth almost becomes a fixation; so much so that the self-exiled Monet knows he is the man to send to Paris on his case. The use of Monet adds to the overall feel that the reader is visiting the era, but in the end it is the exhilarating thriller elements, as seemingly folks from different walks of life want Callender stopped that keep the audience reading.