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Beverle Graves Myers

Venice, 1745, is an age of reckless pleasures, playful artifice, and baroque excess. An accident has reduced Tito Amato's glorious singing voice to a husky croak. But now the male soprano is determined to prove himself as a director. As the Teatro San Marco is losing subscribers to a rival company, the theater's Maestro Torani charges Tito with locating the perfect opera to fill the seats in time for Carnival.

Surprisingly, a second-rate composer provides the very thing—an opera so replete with gorgeous melodies the public speculates it was written by the late Antonio Vivaldi. Even more disconcerting are the rumors swirling around Angeletto, a male soprano imported from Naples to sing the lead. Is the singer truly a castrato or a female soprano engaging in a daring but lucrative masquerade?

Both matters turn dangerous when Maestro Torani is viciously attacked and killed. And Tito is the prime suspect. His own life as well as the future of Teatro San Marco now depend on his skills as a sleuth....

Poisoned Pen Press

Tito Amato Series

Whispers of Vivaldi

Venice, the dazzling city on the lagoon, is sailing toward the ruin of her maritime empire, determined to go down in a maelstrom of pleasure, music, and masquerade.

Venice, 1731. Opera is the popular entertainment of the day, and the castrati are its reigning stars. Tito Amato, mutilated as a boy to preserve his enchanting soprano voice, returns to the city of his birth with his friend Felice, a castrato whose voice has failed. Disaster strikes Tito’s opera premier when the singer loses one beloved friend to poison and another to unjust accusation and arrest. Alarmed that the merchant-aristocrat who owns the theater is pressing the authorities to close the case, Tito races the executioner to find the real killer.

The possible suspects could people the cast of one of his operas: a libertine nobleman and his spurned wife, a jealous soprano, an ambitious composer, and a patrician family bent on the theater’s ruin. With Carnival gaiety swirling around him and rousing Venetian passions in an ominous crescendo, Tito finds that the most astonishing secrets lurk behind the masks of his own family and friends.

Geoffrey Blaisdell

Blackstone Publishing

Interrupted Aria: The First Baroque Mystery

Venice, 1734. Neglecting his vocal practice for dubious pleasures, singer Tito Amato finds himself demoted to secondary roles and overshadowed by a visiting star. When the murder of scene painter Luca Cavalieri threatens to close the opera house, Tito jumps at the chance to regain his worth by finding the killer.

Suspicion falls on members of a Jewish ghetto family that produces masks for the theater. But Tito discovers a mysterious veil that leads him in a different direction. Assisted by Augustus Rumbolt, an Englishman making his Grand Tour, Tito is soon on the trail of Dr. Palantinus, a masked figure who heads a secret society that charges exorbitant fees to partake of its enticing rituals.

But who is behind the mask of Palantinus? Tito's search for the answer pierces the treacherous depths of a city dedicated to masquerade and pleasure, where ancient hatreds thrive, cultures uneasily coexist, and where opera is the stuff of daily life.

Painted Veil: A Baroque Mystery

Tito Amato returns from an operatic tour expecting to relax with his family. Instead he finds his merchant brother Alessandro imprisoned on a trumped-up smuggling charge, a capital crime in 1740 Venice. The senator who controls Alessandro's fate is determined to have a Venetian as the next pope. He forces Tito to Rome to sing at the villa of a powerful, music-loving cardinal who will control the coming papal election.

Spying as he serenades Cardinal Fabiani and his guests, Tito peers into the dark mirror of Roman politics. Pope Clement XII is sinking fast, and two candidates emerge as leading contenders for St. Peter's throne. Will Fabiani support the highborn Venetian whose secret passion is tinkering with electrical experiments? Or the humble cardinal with the gift of healing and a mysterious past?

The discovery of a beautiful corpse in Fabiani's garden complicates Tito's mission. Fabiani believes that a member of his household killed the young maid in a fit of madness, but Tito follows clues that indicate a more complex motive, assisted by his irrepressible manservant Benito and Englishman Gussie Rumbolt. From the heights of the Janiculum Hill to the muddy waters of the Tiber, from a cozy Trastevere cookshop to the chilly corridors of the Quirinal Palace, the trio wrestles with events that could change the course of history. Can Tito stop the killer and affect the election before Pope Clement takes his last breath? Or will Alessandro face the scaffold?

Cruel Music

In September of 1740, singer Tito Amato receives a curious invitation. The German composer Karl Johann Weber is rehearsing a new opera at an isolated villa nestled in the hills of the Venetian mainland. Would Tito accept the lead role? Puzzled by the air of secrecy that enshrouds the production, but attracted by a generous fee, Tito agrees. Artist Gussie Rumbolt, Tito's friend and brother-in-law, has also been summoned to paint scenes of the estate's grape harvest. The two men find the countryside awash with the golden hues of autumn, but the bucolic mood quickly turns menacing when a notorious figure from Tito's past turns up at the villa.

That night, at the stroke of twelve, a soprano stumbles over a stranger who has been beaten to death with the clock pendulum. With the local constable away on a boar hunt, the midnight murderer strikes with impunity, raising terror to a fevered crescendo. Ever faithful to the ideals of truth and justice, Tito pursues his own quest for answers—a quest that leads straight into the painful secrets of his heart and beyond. The Iron Tongue of Midnight is the fourth novel in Myers' Baroque Mystery series. It follows Cruel Music.

The Iron Tongue of Midnight

Venice, 1742. Tito Amato has regained his zest for performing and is once again singing lead roles at the Teatro San Marco. On opening night, the famous castrato has the entire audience entranced—except for one box with its scarlet curtains stubbornly drawn. Annoyed at being ignored, Tito aims the full force of his golden throat at the fourth-tier box. He is astounded when the curtains part and a woman tumbles over the railing.

The victim is Zulietta Giardino, a mischievous courtesan involved with a young glass maker. Did a wager over a rival courtesan's jewels spell Zulietta's death? Or did the motive involve sinister events in the glass factories of Murano?

Tito faces troubles of a different sort at home. His upstanding neighbors regard his household as an immoral den of theatrical riffraff and disdain his wife, Liya, as an apostate Jew. While Liya attempts to reconcile with her disapproving family in the ghetto, Tito strives to be a good father to his adopted son.

Tito Amato Series - The book series

Tito Amato Series - The book series

Tito Amato Series books in order

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