Whispers of Vivaldi
Venice, 1745—an age of reckless pleasures, playful artifice, and baroque excess.
An accident has reduced Tito Amato’s glorious singing voice to a husky croak, forcing him to reinvent himself as a director of his beloved Teatro San Marco. With the theater losing subscribers to a rival company headed by an unscrupulous impresario, San Marco’s Maestro Torani charges Tito with locating the perfect opera to fill the seats in time for the opening of Carnival.
Surprisingly, a second-rate composer provides the very thing—an opera so replete with gorgeous melodies it might well have been written by Antonio Vivaldi, Venice’s greatest composer, dead these past four years. “Perhaps the Red Priest did write the opera,” whispers the gossip snaking through coffeehouses and cafés.
Even more disconcerting are the rumors swirling around Angeletto, a male soprano Tito imports from Naples to sing the lead. Is this exquisite being truly a castrato, or a female soprano engaging in a daring but lucrative masquerade?
More terrible: Maestro Torani undergoes a series of increasingly vicious attacks ending in his murder. And Tito is accused of killing the distinguished maestro so he can become the principal director of San Marco. His own life as well as the future of Teatro San Marco now depends on his skills as a sleuth.
(94,000 words; available as ebook, print, and audiobook)
“Whispers of Vivaldi has all the elements of a rollicking opera buffa; I found myself constantly changing bets on whom the ultimate villain would be (and I was fooled every time). Though one need not be a music lover to savor the book, it may well stimulate readers to listen to Vivaldi’s magic. If so, so much the better. To quote Amato, ‘We’ll make beautiful music here.” —Gerald Elias, Publishers Weekly
“Although Tito is an unlikely hero—castrated as a child, forced to give up the stage when an accident cost him his voice, resigned to living in an unsanctioned marriage with his beloved pagan wife—he pursues his investigation to a satisfying conclusion.” —Kirkus Reviews
