Review: Deadline Rome: The Vatican Kylix

  ROME - Rome author, Sari Gilbert, has penned the ultimate 2021 beach book for readers craving excitement and intrigue unfolding in an exotic, retro atmosphere – Rome 1980ish.

  Exploring Etruscan tombs on the outskirts of Tuscania, Claire, a lovely, twenty-something British journalist, and her latest heart-throb (who unfortunately happens to be a priest) stumble upon a gruesome find: a severed body part left behind by picnickers in a sack of garbage. Claire, who is currently struggling to keep her job, knows a scoop when she sees one, and is determined to make this story the big break of her career. A half-consumed tin of pâté and a grocery shop receipt lead her straight to the villains, but also put her in grave danger. 

  From this promising beginning, Gilbert weaves a complex but plausible plot connecting the severed body part to a purloined kylix, an Etruscan drinking vessel, involving South-American drug lords, the French ambassador, Etruscan fakes, corrupt Vatican officials, Calabrian thugs, kidnapping, money laundering, homicide, greed, and goats. Claire, a freelancer in a male dominated environment, discovers the secret links with the help of her priest.

  Thanks to her informed knowledge of Italian judiciary procedures and law enforcement, and to her familiarity with the cronaca nera of the era, the author, formerly a journalist for Il Sole 24 Ore, takes us through the gritty phases of a realistic criminal investigation. She shows how the different players work together or against each other in solving and prosecuting a crime – and how large personality looms in Italian public and professional life. The international press bureau - with its rivalries, camaraderie, sexism, and dangers is vividly portrayed as is the privileged enclave of the diplomatic community with its swank schools and luxurious tree-fringed neighborhoods.

  Claire successfully navigates these insidious environments thanks to her keen intelligence and extraordinary good looks.  Extremely sensitive to male beauty, emotionally ingenuous yet ruthlessly ambitious in her professional life,  she knows how to exploit her advantages to the full.

  Possessing a compelling plot enacted by a well-drawn cast of characters, headed by the beguiling Claire, Deadline Rome is an entertaining read. But what makes this book a real winner is its setting. Gilbert takes you back to a time before internet, cell phones, FB, selfies, Berlusconi, or Chef Express – when life was lived in person.  To a summer before climate change, when the weather behaved predictably and nobody needed air conditioning.  

  Gilbert, author of a National Geographic guide to Rome,  and an expert on the architecture of her adopted city, depicts the cobbled streets and peeling facades of the centro storico in  sun- drenched tones of red and ochre.  As Claire zips around Trastevere on her motorino, we whiz with her past the monuments, palaces, churches, fountains, and piazzas that once formed the backdrop of those festive, endless Roman summers when romance permeated the evening air, along with the perfumes of jasmine and garlic sauteed in olive oil.  The author celebrates the minutiae of daily life in Rome -- innumerable cups of espresso, linen suits, famous cafes, freshly baked cornetti, impromptu spaghetti dinners,  SIP phone tokens, aperitivi,  gelati, pizza bianca with fresh figs, to remind us how we lived back then. 

  Though readers may pine for that vanished era of long lunches and simple pleasures, Gilbert also reminds us that Rome was still sunk deep in the “leaden years” of terrorism – when political assassinations, kidnappings, and other acts of violence were daily occurrences and when organized crime tainted the highest echelons of power. In Deadline Rome, the insouciant Claire dives straight into the mix, emerging a bit shaken, but unscathed, ready perhaps, for a new adventure, a new scoop, and a new boyfriend.

 

  Review by Linda Lappin

 

Deadline Rome: The Vatican Kylix
by Sari Gilbert
Independently published
406 pages, $14.99