Scottoline brings nineteenth-century Sicily alive in this historical thriller with fairy-tale themes, revenge quests, and compelling heroes reminiscent of William Goldman's The Princess Bride. In the lemon groves outside Palermo, ambitious farm manager Franco Fiorvanti plots to build his own fortune by striking deals with local barons to protect their lemon transports. His twin, Roberto, trains their small army, and the Fiorvantis soon lead an organization built on extortion, class resentments, and fierce outlaw loyalty. Unfortunately, Franco also solidified their power with a dark bargain to kill an aristocrat's young illegitimate son, Dante. In deference to his conscience, instead of killing Dante, Franco has Dante abducted and imprisoned in a madhouse. Gaetano, a lawyer, becomes obsessed with finding Dante and, later, with solving a multitude of kidnappings leaving Palermo's mothers bereft. And, in Sicily's countryside, Lucia and Alfredo, made outcasts by villagers' superstitions, fight to survive in the wild. These five characters' stories collide in the wake of various disasters, and they become twisted in Franco's schemes. Every scene is a full sensory experience, as Scottoline weaves lemon-scented breezes, the ocean's sounds, and sun-baked piazza stones into a timeless, tragedy-strewn story of love, power, and redemption. History fans will appreciate the novel's well-researched foundation, especially concerning the origins of the Sicilian Mafia and early mental-health institutions.

Scottoline (Eternal) delves into the origins of the Sicilian Mafia with the intriguing story of a kidnapping. In early 19th-century Palermo, five-year-old Dante Michangeli is abducted from his wealthy family and left in a madhouse. Meanwhile, Roberto Fiorvanti and his twin brother, Franco, who manages a baron's lemon grove, scheme to make money by organizing a protection racket that targets people traveling to deliver their produce to market. Fifteen years later, Palermo lawyer Gaetano Catalano, newly released from prison for breaking and entering during his search for information about Dante, finds the now 20-year-old at the madhouse and offers to help him reunite with his family. But Dante is reluctant to leave, as he's fallen in love with Lucia Pancari, a beautiful woman who lives off the land and was taught by her mother to keep away from men, but has been visiting Dante at the madhouse after seeking refuge there from lemon pickers. The worlds of these seemingly disparate characters collide with a series of revelations about the complex situation behind Dante's kidnapping. Scottoline brings her characters to life, instilling them with wit and intellect as they navigate the corruption of Sicily's law enforcement. Historical crime fiction fans will be riveted. Agent: Robert Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (Mar.)

Scottoline turns again from the contemporary suspensers she does so well to historical fiction, this time chronicling the birth of the Mafia. Five-year-old Dante is lured away from his mother during Palermo's Festival of St. Rosalia in 1810 and imprisoned in the Ospizio di Santa Teresa. The asylum is so hellish that Dante has no idea he's been shown mercy: Franco Fiorvanti, the ambitious lemon-grove manager who arranged his kidnapping, had been ordered to have him killed. While local attorney Gaetano Catalano calls on his friends in the real-life Beati Paoli to organize a search for the boy as he languishes in the madhouse, Franco, who dreams of starting his own orchard by purchasing some of the land he works from wealthy Baron Zito, tirelessly schemes with and sometimes against his twin brother, Roberto, to amass the necessary resources to achieve his goals. The community he assembles dabbles in many crimes but gradually morphs into a well-oiled protection racket. Over the next 15 years, cheese maker Alfredo D'Antonio struggles to hide his identity as the last Jew in Sicily, and Mafalda Pancari, whose newborn daughter, Lucia, is stigmatized as an albino, abandons her husband and her fair-weather friends to raise the girl on her own. The pattern behind all these subplots is clear enough: examining the perils of both social isolation and social overinvesting of those who place their community above themselves and God. But the tale is so sprawling and filled with so many pop-up outrages and violent deaths that the mastermind behind the kidnapping doesn't even make it onto the Cast of Characters. Whatever you think, Scottoline's been so successful that she's certainly entitled to write more sagas like this one. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.